Recent reviews by Zer0Shade

Steam doesn't reflect accurate playtime due to use of Steam offline mode. Actual time it took me to finish the game was 54 hours according to the save file.

Anyways, I liked the game. Dragon's Dogma 2 has really unique ways of playing with expectations, as the devs are not afraid of letting players miss out on content, for better or worse. I managed to reach the satisfying true ending without resorting to guides, but I can see it would be frustrating if one were to accidentally mess up their playthrough and miss out on certain content.

Exploration of unmapped areas is fun, as there are tons of interesting stuff to discover in the massive open world. DD2 reminded me of the last few Zelda games in that regard. The combat is unique and quite fun. It's more methodical compared to most 3rd person action games, and the grappling system is something you don't really see outside of this series. The story is not much to speak of, but like I said about the game playing with expectations, there was a certain moment in the story that positively surprised me with this.

Overall I recommend the game, especially if you are a fan of the first Dragon's Dogma.

Amazing. Just Amazing. I finished my first playthrough which took about 100 hours and it was brilliant all the way through. I loved the gameplay, which is a turn based game adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons, similar to Solasta or Pathfinder WOTR. There was also some Dragon Age feeling sprinkled in.

The story was great and the reactivity of different choices you can make is insane. I keep wondering how the story would've turned out if I didn't ally myself with specific factions, or if I didn't have certain characters in my party. The ending was so heavily focused on the choices I made, that it is difficult to fathom how there's actually so many different ways for the story to go.

There was also more fanservice than I was expecting, and by that I mean references and returning characters from previous BG games. The developers clearly knew what they were doing. I especially loved Jaheira's portrayal in this game. She's exactly how she should be.

Visuals are really good in terms of genre standards. Baldur's Gate 3 is graphically the best looking CRPG on Steam currently.

Audio was nice. The WHOLE game is voice acted, which is very impressive. Music didn't draw much attention though, but there were a few nice ballads here and there.
Game was also slightly buggy at times, I didn't encounter any gamebreaking issues however. Once the bugs are fixed, I would easily give Baldur's Gate 3 a glowing 10/10 score, and even in current state I would still highly recommend this game for anyone interested in fantasy role playing games.

This is my Game of the Year, and my Rpg of the Decade.

The high review scores and general praise that HI-Fi Rush gets are not exaggerated. The game is genuinely great with nice visuals, fun characters and amazing gameplay. Price was also half from what most would ask for a game like this.

It's seriously amazing.

-Great Soundtrack
-Fast paced and fun gameplay
-Good visual style and level design
-Lot of gameplay variety through different characters

Freedom Planet 2 has everything that an Action Platformer needs to be a good game.

For an indie game, Century looks pretty damn good. Gameplay is like plane dogfighting but with dragons, and a little bit of arena shooter elements mixed in.

Game is completely free to play with no pay-to-win elements at all, so give it a try. The cosmetic monetization system is quite generous even to free players, which means that you really don't need to pay anything to get the full experience, unless of course you just want to support the devs. These guys have clearly done a lot of work simply out of love for the themes of the game, and they deserve plenty of praise for this.

The initial marketing for this game didn't really pull me in, but the increasing amount of gameplay clips I saw post-release made it look interesting and I ended up picking it up, and I gotta say that I didn't expect to like this game nearly as much as I did. It's actually amazing.

Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a turn-based monster collecting rpg in a very similar vein to Pokémon, except that the visuals, world design, story and especially the animations are all set on a much higher level. The battle system is a fun combination of several layers of Rock-Paper-Scissors, effective element strategizing and enemy moveset memorisation (again, like Pokemon). The character customisation is tried and true Monster Hunter style, with many of the favorite sets from the series making a return, and the monster roster is also very respectable with 128 different monsters to fight. Couple of them are colored variants of each other, and you cannot add some of them to your own team, but there are still plenty of amazing creatures to collect.

The game is also considerably lengthy at around 60 hours for the main story (at least on my pace, but I did do plenty of side quests as well). The post-game is also implied to be quite robust, so I'm excited to keep going and see what else there is in store.

Now that the final update is here and the developers are going to shift to new projects, I think it's time I finally gave this a review. I have 485 hours in game at the time of this writing, about half of which are spent in the this expansion. (Steam doesn't seem to count any hours for this).

Iceborne is an expansion for Monster Hunter: World that pretty much doubles the amount of content in the game. It adds two new locales and a lot of new and returning fan-favorite monsters into the game, while also updating some weapon mechanics a little bit.

The new weapon mechanics are mostly good, adding some great utility moves for the weapons that can patch up some of the internal weaknesses of some of the weapons. The new Clutch Claw tool is a bit of a mixed bag though. Some people like it, some do not. I'm mostly neutral about it, as I feel like it would work nicely as its own weapon type, but having it implemented onto every weapon can feel a bit weird. But despite some people claiming so, I personally don't feel like Clutch Clawing is required, to effectively beat some monsters, which is why I don't have issues with it. One of the latest patches also greatly buffed the claw's effect duration, which in other words means you don't need to use it as often anyways, which is a plus.

The new monsters are also really good. They brought back some of my favorites like Zinogre and Nargacuga, and made some new monsters like Velkhana which has also become one of the best on the roster.
Overall this expansion is just more Monster Hunter, so if you already like the base game (which imo is already stellar and well deserving of being Capcom's best selling game of all time), then you'll like this expansion as well.

A small rant about steam reviews below. Probably not worth reading.
I should probably address the other reviews too, as the expansion is currently sitting at "Mixed" rating. It's important to know that Monster Hunter: World and the Iceborne expansion have now been subject to a total of 5 different review bombs, of which only 2 had some actual reason behind it. Those two being performance issues at launch and when the developers tried to add an anti-cheat system into the game. (both of which were fixed later). While I personally didn't experience noticeable issues, I can understand why people were angry about them.
The other 3 bombings were for reasons like: the game coming to PC later than consoles, third party mods not being compatible with some updates, and Chinese taking issue with Paul W. S. Anderson's writing in the MH movie, despite the game and Capcom having nothing to do with that.

Most people who like MHW and its expansion only put up a review on the base game, which makes it really hard for this expansion to recover its proper review rating.

An absolute blast. One of the best combat systems seen in first-person shooters to date. Doom Eternal gives the player almost overwhelming amount of tools to use and a lot of demons to use them on. The combat is very fast paced and the amount of enemies and projectiles on the screen makes it a very intense experience.

The level design is visually very impressive, as the hell on earth theme has been done really well. Gameplaywise, Doom Eternal uses the same arena style combat formula found in Doom 2016, where most of the action happens in designated arenas, which are connected by smaller routes that only contain a few demons, if any.
One annoying aspect of the levels are a couple of "purple goo" sections that cover the ground with slime that prevents jumping and slows down movement. Thankfully the amount of goo pools in the game can be counted with one hand and can mostly be avoided too, so they don't get in the way too much.

Your weapon arsenal is quite similar to what it was in Doom 2016. You got your shotguns, rocket launcher, chainsaw, plasma guns, assault rifle and a minigun, and most of these have gotten noticeable upgrades. Most prevalent one being the Super Shotgun grappling hook that quickly pulls you towards an enemy and is very fun to use. In addition to these weapons, Doomguy is now equipped with other tools as well, like the shoulder mounted grenade/ice bomb launcher, flamethrower, quick dash, heavy damaging punch shockwave and a couple of other weapons of mass destruction. The glory kill system also makes a return, where you can wound an enemy and then perform a quick and brutal execution move on them to gain some health drops in return. Understandably the amount of buttons required at once gets quite high with all of these tools, but that's one of those things where getting good at it is really satisfying.

Most of my playtime in this game was spent in steam offline mode, so the hour counter at the time of writing this doesn't match the actual time I spent. I finished the campaign on both Ultra-Violence & Nightmare, and for the first playthrough it took about 14-16 hours, which is a very good length for a single player game.

Definitely recommended.

From store page description:
"ApeX of 2D action"
"New era of 2D action"
"Stylish side-scrolling action like never before"
"Ultimate in classic 2D action"

You know, if this was any other company, I would say that they're just tooting their own horn with this description.

Game is really good btw.
Another great entry at Inti creates' already impressive track record.

Divinity OS:2 is one of my favorite RPG's and was my game of the year for 2017. Pen & paper freedom, great characters, good story and fantastic turn-based combat combined with a ton of replayability makes Original Sin 2 a definite 10 out of 10 experience.