Recent reviews by _Oin_

The best soulslike not made by the From Software.

A beautiful metroidvania with a very engaging story and Lovecraftian vibes. Unfortunately, the game was off to a bad start because of various issues plaguing it at launch. Now it's hurt by mixed reviews. It is awesome. Especially if you're into atmosphere, story and some puzzles because gameplay itself is simply okay. Most of the things people complained about are already fixed and the game definitely deserves the attention of metroidvania fans.

The Emperor protects.

Is it a 10/10 masterpiece? No.
More like 8+ or 9 out of 10.

There are issues with PC port (e.g. camera forcefully moving in the direction character is walking which causes "stutter" if you're trying to look elsewhere, lack of full control over key bindings, cumberstone interface, pretty much limitations inherited from the console version of the game), a few boss fights are just bad design, catacombs feel like copy and paste at times, nothing really dealbreaking but it's not as flawless as some reviewers may want you to think.

It's a great game with one of the most rewarding feeling of exploration and adventure I've ever played. That alone gets you hooked wanting to see more and more. Elden Ring will definitely be the game that other open world titles are going to compare against in the years to come. It can be a huge disappointment for Sekiro fans, though, as it's pretty much a Dark Souls 4.

Halo Infinite multiplayer sucks.

Progression system is one of the main reasons. It's based on arbitrary challenges instead of just playing the game, killing enemies and doing objectives in whichever mode you like. Winning or losing doesn't matter at all. You are the best player in your team and have most points at the end of the game? Here, have 50 experience points. You are the bottom of the bracket and a noob? The same. One of the worst progressions I have ever seen in any game. Doesn't reward good players. Doesn't let you progress for doing what you are supposed to do.

Atrocious sound design. You can't hear stuff. Enemy footsteps when they are coming behind you? Not really. Distant shooting and explosions to get your bearings on the map? Not exactly. Everything is either heavily muffled or non-existent. I had to constantly glance at the radar to know what's going on and it doesn't have a big radius anyway.

Related to the above, weapons feel like plastic toys doing pew-pew. There is no "oomph" to them. Effects are not "juicy" or "heavy". Shooting, reloading, everything seems bland. This is science-fiction, not ARMA or some kinda game that aims for hyper-realistic sounds. Devs should've made some effort around that.

UI design in general could've been better. There are too many clicks to get anywhere...

Too much waiting. You wait in the menus. You wait for the game to start. You wait for the game to load. You wait for the other players to load the game. Horrible.

The gameplay is solid, though. And maps have good design. Even if some of them feel too big for 4v4 modes. Slower pace and high TTK can be a good or bad thing depending on the player - I didn't really like it.

Well, looks like Halo is not my type of game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've been trying out Destiny 2 over the weekend. I was in the mood to shoot some things and blow stuff up recently and it's free to play so I thought why not, let's give it a try. I liked it. A lot. The gunplay, art direction, location design, atmosphere, how each race and place is different in terms of colours and feeling, sound and voice acting (nice to hear familiar voices from some TV series I loved). It's a great game. And then I uninstalled it, despite all that. On every single step I encountered a paywall. Story? There's no story in the base game as far as I could tell. Yeah, there's that introduction thing, you're a Guardian, yada yada, but that was more of a welcome pack about game mechanics than explanation of anything. Every single quest is basically an advertisement for an expansion. Everywhere you go, the game reminds you that if you want to have content, you have to pay. Every. Single. Step. Otherwise it's mostly free-roam and public events on each planet, bunch of strikes, gambit and so on but it felt so limiting. You have to own x to access y. I've spent almost 200 hours in Warframe and had my expectations set quite high in terms of the amount of F2P content and maybe that's why this was such a disappointment for me personally... A friend tells me that some campaign is gonna be free in December and I should go back and play it then so maybe I will. It's an awesome game. If you're willing to pay. Otherwise it's annoying or at least I found it annoying seeing messages about paywall everywhere.

The story is worth the effort but the gameplay is so outdated that it's best to use the easiest difficulty settings.

Stopped being fun long time ago.

Sekiro™: Shadows Die Until They Git Gud

Short and boring compared to the episode 0 and 1...