Recent reviews by Donoghu

I'm still early in the game, but for what I have seen up to now I would recommend the game.

The first thing to consider is that the game makes uses of quite a few features from the Unreal Engine 5 that requires a well maintained PC with quite some decent parts if you want to play with anything higher than low/medium. Even so, there are no guaranties that your PC can run it as well as you might want. The requirement between Low and Epic graphics settings are like night and day so don't be surprised if even your PC cannot run it at max settings.

My PC is average, but has parts that are extremely well known/updated and I can run this game at low/medium at a steady 60 FPS.

For the gameplay, I would say that it's relatively close to your typical Soul-like game, but with some features that seems similar to other similar game and not just about FromSoftware games.

First, the riposte is quite a LOT easier than FromSoftware and most enemies have some relatively well noticeable wing-up momentum before they do their attacks. Still, the riposte is not "perfect" as you will still get a small % of the damage dealt which can be recovered if you hit the enemy afterward. Blocking with a shield also have damage seeping through (obviously more than with riposte) and that damage can also be recovered afterward. Getting hit while you got some chipped health (gray bar) makes you loose said health from being recovered. Hence, it's often a game of tag where you try to avoid getting hit, riposte when you feel confident and hit back if you had to block or riposte to recover any health lost. But you're far from immortal as most enemies have less health then the damage they deal meaning getting hit might requires you to hit 1-3 enemies to death to recover all damage received.

The game involves a dual-layered world. You can view and interact a minimum in the Umbral world (2nd world) through a projection created by a magical lamp you can point with or rip open a gate and enter it. While in the normal world, you may die once and instantly revive in the Umbral World. So being in the normal world kinda offers you a 2nd chance. While in the Umbral World, your healing is reduced (some part becomes chipped damage that requires you to hit an enemy to recover) and there are respawning enemies everywhere that becomes more numerous as you remain in that world. (In the Umbral world, there are status-like creature everywhere. The longer you stay in that world, the more status becomes enemies as you comes close to them. Moving between areas respawns those status-like thing even if you are not resting.) Some paths are only available within one of the 2 world and there are some minor/simple puzzle. You can only return from the Umbral World by either using a specific kind of corpse (they break after being used once, but respawn when the world is reset) purposely put around, resting at a crusader corpse which is holding a blue lamp, dying in it and returning to the last rest point.

If you're used to the Souls-like genre, you'll feel a familiarity in this game when it comes to combat, but the game does have its own kind of balances so don't get the idea that "everything" you might have learned in other games will work in this one. In fact, I highly recommend that you level up until you barely have any souls left and attempt and practice various enemies to master the controls.

As for the multiplayer aspect of the game. You have a few choices:
• Being a target for BOTH PvE (anyone) and PvP.
• Being a target for PvP and with your Steam Friends for PvE. (No random player can join your for PvE, but anyone can invade you)
• Joining another player who is an active target for PvE (or a friend).
• Joining another player who is an active target for PvP.

As you might has guessed, many players are joining (either for PvE or PvP), but only a few opens up the gate to others due to the risks. Also, you cannot joint another player "further" in the story, hence, early on, it's extremely easy to get invaded for PvP, but extremely hard to find another player for PvE.

There's also a revenge system which allows a player to find an enemy (as stronger variant) that killed another player for additional souls and specific currency that can be used at some point.

And there's an Umbral possession system which allow a monster to be immortal (with blue HP instead of red) for as long as it's possessed by the Umbral spirit hanging around it. You can only remove that spirit by absorbing it with your lamp deployed. It can requires you to strafe around the enemy while avoiding its attacks until you can see the spirit and can absorb it.

The game is far from perfect, but it's a good game when you're used to its kind. I would say that, early on, the game does feels a bit restrictive on the customization as over 90% of the equipment you'll find are drop from enemies you keep killing and, for the most part, those equipment might be worse that any starting equipment with a few exception.

While I recommend this game, I got to point out that this game is, at most, a 7/10 if not 6/10.

The gameplay on the player side is relatively neat and great. The game has a simple yet efficient progression system that allows you to build your deck without becoming too overpowerful on each run. You have to gain chaos crystal (which falls from defeated enemies and some other possible sources) to unlock the basic version out of each spell. You can unlock any non-curse artifact (though the available ones to purchase are random), but can only start each run with 1. There are sets with the artifacts to unlock bonus effects that requires some planning and luck.

So why would I give it a 6/10 or 7/10? Well, the weakness of this game is enemies or, to be more precise, how the enemies attack behaves. For example, some enemies can be frozen, but being frozen doesn't cancel their attack windup meaning that as soon as they unfreeze or get hit, they instantly hit you. Some enemies attack follows you through your dash ability. I have seen archers charging their attack and as I dash behind them just before they shoot, they turn 180 degrees instantly and hit me in the back right as I end my dash. There's also the inconsistency of the enemies' attacks' hit boxes. Certain attacks are way larger than their visual representation and you get hit out of thin air while outside of the attack. As the game is 2D, it's also extremely hard to gasp the depth at which an AOE attack will reach because the red circle only demonstrate the center of the attack, but not the exact range of it. (You may still get hit while 1 character-width of outside of the red circle).

Can it be mastered? 100% yes. But it's still bad design regardless, hence why while I recommend the game, I got to put out a note that the game is good, but extremely far from perfect.

While the game isn't perfect and there are quite a few things that could be done better, I'm heavily scaling toward recommending this game for anyone who looks for something that has/requires:
• Good teamwork
• Communication
• All ranges of difficulties going from walk in the park while shooting cuddling bugs up to "Ho my GO~D! What am I doing HE~RE!?!"
• Limited and restricted progression for relatively medium-long time investment.

If you want a game where you can unlock everything you want from the start just by playing a few hours like a pro, you'll have a massive problem with this game because this game makes uses of a progression-based restriction such as requiring you to unlock a bunch of stuff before you may unlock the weapon you want or which got recommended by friend or some video. For example, to unlock the armor or weapon of your choice, you may have to invest 80 medals to unlock even just the ability to unlock it and at that point, it might cost you 50 or 60 medals to unlock. And you get 2-3 medals per mission completed unless you found 1 or 2 more laying in hidden caches while on said mission.

Also, this game makes heavy uses of dynamic tricks to render its world. This means that ANY PC with even just minor issues when it comes to RAM, VRAM, power supply, GPU, CPU, etc. have high chance of crashing or even system crashing (BSOD). For me, I only crashed once in 10h up to now and I'm playing on an average-high PC (was relatively high-end ~5 years ago).

For those who played the first Helldivers game, Helldivers 2 feels like if it was the child of Helldivers 1 and Mass Effect Andromeda.

First, as a online-focused game, V Rising does everything really well because it offers every option you might want to use: Dedicated servers? Check. Private server on your own machine? Check. Rent a private server if you can't do it yourself? Check. Run on LAN with your family members or friends around the house or with the use of a remote-LAN setup? Check! While the game is an online-only game in its systems, you're not stuck at using their servers. If there was only 1 kinda-issue at the moment is that you're progression is attached to the server you started with and you can only have 1 character per account per server. (The account/ID on a server is bind to the Steam's ID, from what it seems.) So if you want to restart, it's not possible without asking it to the owner of the server unless there's a wipe.

Yes, some servers have servers-wide wipe every 6 months or so. Others might not have wipe, but their castle/keep blood consumption get raised a bit so that you got to refill it (which can take a bit of time depending on your progress) every X days or your keep/castle deteriorates, which slowly damage your walls until someone can reach your castle core and make it go "boom'! But if you don't like any of the options in the existing servers, nothing stops your from starting your own with your own rules, difficulties, etc.

When it comes to the game, it's the kind of game that has a relatively long-term investment requirement in time. If you play with other players as a clan, you might do some stuff faster or easier. Note that being in a clan is required if you want to be able to heal/help each others because even in a PVE server, you can't heal or buff others "just like that" as you come close. (You can revive them, but nothing else.) This is a remaining effect from the PVP side (as you wouldn't want to heal someone who's trying to kill you).

The progression is not your typical progression system, but it's based on what you're wearing (your level it tied to your equipment level) and raising your equipment level requires that you upgrade/build/grow you keep/castle with more stations and that requires that you hunt specific bosses, resources, etc. If you think of this game as a game that plays like "Diablo", you'll end up dead, angry and lost. About 80% of the game reminds me of Ultima Online where you're required to constantly move between gathering points, kills lots of enemies for their drops, etc. to get stronger bit by bit. In fact, when I played on a server with active people in the chat, they were talking about part of the game that seems light years ahead of me.

The cool thing about the equipment/upgrade system is that the devs did an awesome job when it comes to the satisfaction of doing something, Even if you only get +2-3 damages from upgrading a weapon, you'll feel the positive aspect from it without it feeling too weak or too suddenly overpowered. Each miles you move cross matters!

I highly recommend this game to those who like to solve puzzles in terms of resource managements and creations. This game doesn't hold you hand for more than half an hour at most, then you're on your own with a global chat to guide you when you're truly lost. If you hate games that forces you to constantly craft new stuff, move alone and don't look at this game, you're gonna hate it!

If I had to point one possible weak point, at the moment of this review, it's the spread population across multiple servers. Most of the time, public servers barely have 10 people on them at one time. So it's not a game where you'll be playing and finding tons of people to play with. Out of that 10 people, you might have 1 or 2 around your part and the rest has either at lot more or a lot less progression done.

First, let me point out that at this moment, the game is quite rough around its edges and might not be "up-to-the-taste" of those who cannot stand games that lack certain level of quality. For instance, the game is extremely weak when it comes to the impact/dynamism of the combat and feels like an old MMORPG where you spam attack buttons in a certain order and move your character at the "best" position on the battlefield based on your class/build.

It's also lacks a LOT of information in terms of its systems. If you look at stats or items bonus and wonder what something means, well... either you find a guess of an answer in the forum or you guess it yourself as the game has, at the moment, absolutely no way of know what each line of text in the stats does or how it work behind the screen.

With that said, I do recommend the game for anyone who like old-school dungeon crawling RPG where you actually have to either be good are remembering each rooms layout or actually draw a map on paper while playing. This game have maze-like dungeons that runs for HOURS and no map. You often comes at crossroads and select one path, then another crossroad and after almost 20 minutes of following a path and killing enemies, you ends up at that exact same crossroad as you were previously not noticing you have walking in a bizarre circle since then.

At the moment, the random drops (items) are not exactly good nor extremely bad. You'll find hundreds of drops in a run and lots of it will have useless stats that makes no senses as the randomization of the items is extremely broad. Some bonus on certain items may be absolutely useless to the kind of character which is targeted by that specific item.

But that may also be a charm of the game for those who love to not get spoon-fed only specific items targeted toward your class like in old-school D&D style RPGs.

Dark Light is a good Metroidvania (sidescroller with RPG elements) set in a fantasy sci-fi environment. The difficulty is medium-low with a few moments where it spikes up a bit. I did had some issues where some inputs weren't working at all, but it might have been related to the Steam Controller settings not working well with the game. The game does have its moment where the framerate drops noticeably even though my PC can run even the latest complex 3D games at high if not highest settings.
Still, for 98% of the time, it runs smoothly and it's fun in a simple way.
For its price, I do recommend it to anyone who's looking for a dystopian metroidvania game. :)

First, note that I haven't played that many MechWarrior games so if this existed in previous titles, it wasn't really part of the few ones I played so bare with me.

MechWarrior 5 is reminding me of basically what Armored Core used to be, but within the MechWarrior style of mech battles. You're managing a company of mercenaries also as its main pilot. You customize your mech, hire potential AI-driven pilots to assist you (which can be replaced with actual players in Coop) and select what kind of mission you want to participates in. The game has its lot of management-based decisions and it's has some light-yet-manageable funds & resources management requirements.

The game core fundamental system roam around the fact that each mission you take and each action you initiate will cost you time in a value called "days". You need to fix your main battle mech? It might takes, for example, 28 days and if you're low on funds and got to pay your crew in 2 weeks (it happens once every 90 days), you might be forced to do a mission with a secondary or lighter/weaker mech. When you accept a contract, many times, it comes with a time limits in days and you might be over-weighted (some mission has a low or high weight limit) hence you might be forced to use a lighter mech or strip/replace parts of your current mech for lighter ones and that, again, cost time (and funds). Failing a mission gives you a bit of funds, but can cost a pretty penny as a broken mech will most likely cost more than the base fee from any failed mission.

The cool thing is that if you hate the campaign, you can just skip it and if you do the campaign, by the end you can move on into the actual gameplay meat (while keeping what you had in the campaign) of the game which is the Career mode. Basically, the Career mode is an open-never-ending world of randomized missions in regions around a big zone in the infinity of space. You chose who to work with (from each available fractions) and depending on your relation and who's controlling the area, you may suffer increase in cost and time for repairs and parts or gain some favorable prices and/or rewards.

There's no matchmaking system, meaning you got to look up for friends to play with and players can only join by using the host's line of available mechs and not their own from their own company). This means that it takes a bit of time before you can invite others into playing with you (unless they don't care about using weak broken mechs). So, do NOT buy this game expecting to play the whole thing with a random new friend. The coop mode is more or less a secondary feature fit into the existing feature of having on-field allies with their own mechs YOU funded and build up. Kinda like how you're quite limited in how many mechs you can hold onto early on, hence playing with a full range of 4 mechs can be a bigger risk than running with a team of 2 to 3 mechs (if you can manage the mission with such team) as 4 mechs in a single battle means that you'll have 4 mechs on the repair bench if things get sours and don't have many spare mechs on hand.

While I'm not much of a fan on using Mods, this game is supposedly mods-friendly, but seems to comes with its fair share of issues whenever the devs patches something and it end up breaking a popular mod or something. So, while this game is moddable, remember that there are no guaranties that updates won't break your modded game.

I do have my fair share of fun playing this in Vanilla + all DLC. Does every DLC is worth it? Not exactly (unless on sale), but if you want the full access to all the mechs and parts available, it's kinda needed as it gives you access to new factions' markets.

Okay, first let's point the elephant in the room: While I do recommend this game, anyone who's looking into buying or not should be warned that the game is pretty much half-dead (pun intended). There are really few players online still playing the game, hence you should not purchase this with, in mind, the idea that it will be really easy to find other players to play with.

In about 2 hours, 2 players have joined my game while I was still in the story Tutorial.

Now, let's put a bit more details about the good and the bad of the game.

First, let's start with the bad because there are some points that can be 100% turn off for some players regardless of the good.

One thing that I found bad would be how the game give a good idea on the basics, but just leave you hanging about any important non-control systems in the game. If you only take what's told during the tutorial, you're not even learning half of what's required to play the game. Even the actual basic information about how to play the game is fed in small bits here and there over a long period of time.

Another thing is the stupidity of the "magazine" in the game. To be able to add a mod onto a gun, you need to find the appropriate magazine in a specific story mission and put it into your bag. The thing though is that you can find weapons with those mods already attached and detach them (even by mistake), but then be unable to attach them back. At the beginning, the game put a lot of stuff at your reach without giving you the actual ability to use it. It's as stupid as not being able to use an incendiary ammo clip for a pistol that looks identical to regular clip, but in red because you haven't read a magazine yet.

Also, another point that, while not exactly negative in the game itself, did give me a negative feel of the game is how, in the story mission, you start every mission without any of the stuff you had in the previous mission and while it does give you access to a load of weapons, you loose whatever gun and mods you were using previously. (Note: This only happens in story mode as Survival mode allows you to keep your stuff, which is kinda counter-intuitive.)

Another negative point is how weapons are just "bad" at being handled with 2 hands. For example, while holding a pistol with both hands, the off-hand is totally wrong (kinda like if you break your wrist upside-down) and 2-handing guns and even melee weapon actually give nothing more than just swinging it with hand. (No, the game doesn't have an heavy impact on 1-handing any melee weapon. In fact, it's easier to aim the weapon's blade toward the zombies' head while holding the weapon in 1 hand as it give you better reach and as much damage than 2 handling.) I noticed that it was more stable to use 1 hand to hold guns (including rifles) and use my other hand to support my main hand than to hold the guns with both hands. That's because holding rifles with 2 hands seems to involve some conflict between the main and offhand position and the weapon gets giggly at moments if 1 controller is slightly off the grid.

Now, some of the good.

The game has a good sens of action vs horror/stress. Zombies aren't scary at all if you got your guns, whenever it comes the moment where you got to reload it, you can feel the pressure of having to switch to another gun or melee weapon to kill some stuff before reloading.

The game has a good setup for the loadout with 2 weapon slots (1 can be used for a bow) on the shoulders, 2 pistol slot (thighs) and 1 main gun slot (chest) and you're limited to enough ammunition to feel armed, but not too many to feel like you can just open fire all the time.

Once you know what you got to find on the map (in the story missions), the mission becomes more interesting. At first, I though it was kinda like L4D where you just move from A to B to C following a mission and, at that moment, I found it a tad bit boring, but searching around can grant you upgrade (some are only for story mode & trial modes).

Personally, I have experience a good network quality over the multiplayer. With a few sync glitch here and there, but nothing game breaking, I had fun playing with the 2 lone players who joined me.

Graphically, the game is alright. It's no graphical novelty, but it also doesn't look cheap. The night/dark atmosphere with some fog also gives the setting a good zombie atmosphere.

Personally, I would give this game a passing score of

While I do recommend Cook-Out, I'll warn any people who wonder about buying this game or not that the multiplayer is bare-bone and you'll be playing, for the most part, with kids under 9.

I think this is the game where I have seen the highest number of kid (voiced like kids and acting like kids) that are clearly under the minimum age requirement for any headsets. Damn, I even played with a toddler, I think... because whatever it was, it sounded like a toddler, acted like a toddler (throwing stuff around, spraying mayonnaise and ketchup all around the table and laughing that toddler's laugh all the time while doing it.)

On the multiplayer, either you play with immature kids or you play with veterans that either kick you off immediately (even if you filtered "Play For Fun" when searching for a game) or, in some case where they join your own game, will hang around for a few rounds trying to rush you through the game without even using a mic and ultimately quite because they are fed from waiting for you to read the details displayed on your screen.

So, yes, if you plan to play online, either play with your already-made friends who got the game and a VR headset or wait until you're a pro.

The offline is good, but the fact that you're assisted by a single NPC (a robot) that requires you to recharge it every now and then (as it covers some essential ingredients production) makes less fun than if you were 4 players properly using the table and actually speaking to each other. (With the silent veterans I played with, I felt like I when I was working as a dishe washer boy a decade ago where I had to learn by looking, not talking and where I constantly had to try to guess what to do next while, primarily, looking at what the vet was doing by itself so that we don't do the mistake preparing the same ingredient for the same plate.)

If this was a scoring system, I would give this a 6/10 as at this precise moment. 5/5 for the gameplay, 1/5 for the social element when you don't play with actual friends with the proper age and/or even just a mic.

Until You Fall is a great VR game that requires coordination between both of your arms, good timing and observation... and also painkillers for your body on the next day if you plan on playing for a while.

This is a game that requires you to break a sweat and swing and swing and swing even more. The "harder" you swing (broader + faster), the more damage you deal, hence why you swing like there's no tomorrow. You'll swing even more if you select lighter weapons (faster, easier to control, less damage).

I only played 1.3 hours in a single at this point, but I felt so much pain on the next morning that I decided to make this game a "once a week" experience until I get used to it.

If I had to point out 1 tiny problem with the game, while using a Quest 2 in Air Link mode, it's that the game seems to fail to recognize the position of my controllers when they are 90 degrees on the right or left (like above my shoulders or near my butt) at irregular times (maybe once every 8 to 12 swings).