Recent reviews by Dracasis

Days Gone is a weird recommend. It isn’t a particularly good game, the best I can say is that it's mostly functional . The story is good and its atmosphere is pretty spot on but the game hardly evolves past its second hour and is pretty 'okay'.

The game's biggest negative is its pretty lackluster gameplay loop. I wouldn’t at all call it a survival game as it lacks almost all the elements you would expect from a survival game; it's more of an open world story adventure with a seriously light sprinkling of some base level survival elements. Additionally, as mentioned, the gameplay doesn't really evolve or change much as the game continues. As you complete story events the world will scatter occasional harder 'elite' zombies in and human encampments will obtain more and more frequently armored targets that just sponge more hits but that's about it.

The stealth gameplay was pretty enjoyable and is why it took me so long to finish the game. Going in guns blazing is an order of magnitude faster but I enjoyed the element of scouting and figuring out the best way to take out most or all of an enemy encampment without anyone noticing. Granted the almighty rock is stupidly powerful for this method of play to the point that it felt kinda cheep to stack a mountain of bodies in a corner cause no one cares that 6 of their friends are already dead in the pile they're walking through but whatevers.

Fighting hoards was the absolute worse part of the game and you're forced to do it multiple times. Not sure who at Bend thought that was enjoyable enough to want to make their players do it over and over again a fistful of times but doing the last required hoard took me over 2 hours to finally clear out. The zombies ability to magically know where I am when sniping from 200 meters or tossing explosives from a rooftop was unimaginably frustrating.

But the story kept me interested, side missions felt generally rewarding and the characters and their motivations were overall well portrayed; perhaps with the one exception of Deacon's schizophrenic personality where he could be screaming about needing to murder a camp of raiders one second and chirping happily about collecting berries from a bush the next. I played hard on the first run and wasn’t particularly challenged. I died a couple times but no more than I would have expected so would recommend pushing the difficulty up one or two if you do want a challenge or just backing it down to story mode to just go through the main reason to play DG at all.

Also, I don’t know who on Bend had the extreme motorcycle fetish but next time could you drop the fuel requirement? It really didn’t add anything to the game and having to fill up on fuel 100 times throughout the game didn’t add anything meaningful. Even if the bike had an absolutely atrocious range of, like, 150km on a tank you'd be able to drive around the entire fully unlocked map 20 times before needing to fill up once. I felt like the bike had a leak in it with how frequently it needed filled up XD

Anyway, game's not bad but it's not particularly good either. Not a survival game so don’t buy it if you were looking for a survival game but the story is compelling and gameplay is enough to string it along.

Oh, and don’t buy if you're coprophobic.

Rabi-Ribi didn’t do much for me. After an hour there wasn’t much gameplay and was kinda very basic as a game. The story was pretty off the wall and I couldn’t get into it. Not much of an anime person so maybe the nearly-naked hourglass girl art hits it well enough for some crowds but as a game it was very mediocre.

The trailer makes it seem like there's more to the gameplay than I actually found in the game which is disappointing. So with neither a compelling story nor compelling game to play, couldn’t really give it a thumbs up. It's not a bad game as apparently many thousands of people seem to agree but I gave it an hour of my time and found myself utterly too bored with it to continue.

Last installment of the HL2 franchise in VR. The required vehicle usage may turn some off but the comfort options should allow most people to get through it. Boss arenas are tough but manageable in this installment and the gameplay is notably more fun in EP2 as Alyx takes more of an ancillary role this time.

Makes me sad that this is the end of this story but very much enjoyed the entire journey in VR. Definitely worth a play through!

An enjoyable continuation of the franchise in VR. No vehicles this time so a little easier to swallow but less interesting overall as a game since Alyx and the super gravity gun do most of the work. The boss fight set pieces don’t work very well in VR this time unfortunately requiring a level of precision to execute that is extremely difficult to manage in VR. Don’t feel bad if you need to turn down the difficulty or use a cheat to get past the antlion guardian.

But if you liked HL2 VR, this is a great addition taking all the things the modding team learned in the original and applying it to EP1 in a shorter but still fun package.

I found Dysmantle a fairly fun survival game. It's got plenty of issues that keep it from being a great game but still totally worth a purchase if it's your kind of game.

Some of its positives are:
- It's a large world with lots to explore
- Controls are simple but effective
- Equipment variety and collectables feel valuable most of the time
- Sound design is acceptable
- Art style works well
- World feels very well crafted and lived in

Some of its issues are:
- Game is very grindy. As its title suggests, there's a lot of destruction used to gain resources and I had to destroy multiple entire towns down to their foundations to get enough resources for all the game's mechanics.
- Base building is kinda underwhelming. Your build limit is pretty low, even at its max, compounded by some items taking multiple points to place. Ended up removing most of my 'base' to make room for more utility items (need quite a bit of build cost to make a halfway decent farm). Would have liked to see the base building mechanic limited outside of the 'build area' the game provides you and unlimited within its bounds.
- A lot of the equipment is useless, mildly situationally useful or should have just been given as passive bonuses (looking at you fishing lure). Equipment slots are limited but you can swap most of it any time you want so it became a chore swapping out fishing lure or element resistance or 'poison' resistance equipment all the time for their situational bonuses.
- Enemies get pretty samey pretty quickly. There are only 12 enemy types (excluding bosses) and only 9 of which you see regularly so the game is absolutely packed with fodder that, after you get the axe equipment a third of the way through the game, feel pretty overused and underwhelming. I rarely felt threatened by anything other than the Mutated Hurler and only then because their attacks were fairly random and could 'accidentally' hit me some times despite my best efforts.
- The story is weird and doesn't really come to a satisfying conclusion. There are hints as to what it might be but few of the game's mysteries are actually resolved by the end.

Steam says 65 hours at time of review but I'd put it closer to 40 actual hours with a lot of it spent idling in the background. I don’t regret the playtime and do hope 10tons tries again. Though, for the love of all that's holy, make run a toggle or something next time. My poor thumb can't take holding a button down for almost 40 hours…

I enjoyed FTL and had to give this one a try despite the other reviews mentioning the comparison issues. To start, it is a very pretty game that is fully functional, responsive and generally enjoyable if the type of game it is is something you like. The main issue I have with it is that it is very random and its randomness isn’t balanced in a way that allows you to deal with the issues the game will throw at you.

There are many ways to die and, while there are generally ways to counter those problems, if you are working on shoring up one shortcoming with upgrades, equipment, crew, etc. it seems to often leave you too vulnerable to 2 or 3 other ways you can be killed if you run into the wrong enemy. That begs the question of 'why don’t you just split your resources and cover all your bases'; you can do that eventually but it takes time and luck not to be hammered by something you're not ready to handle.

You can also run from most fights as well but you cant win without fighting so trying to figure out what will be your downfall and what's a winnable battle is very hard. The bounty system is also not very clear. I had no idea whether a 2.4 bounty was high in the second system or not. I don’t often like comparing one game to another but the fact that this is a direct copy of FTL I kinda have to: it was pretty clear in FTL when things were going to ramp up. When you went to a new system things got harder, if you lingered in a system for too long the very clear danger zone increased. In Trigon I have absolutely no idea where my risk level is. Some danger (!) ships are total pushovers and some cut through me like butter with no rhyme or reason (further increasing the confusion of danger level).

Otherwise the systems and gameplay are basically the same as FTL with just some tweaks here and there. Some of them I liked and others I was mostly indifferent about. Other than the lack of balanced encounter design it’s a fine game but I couldn’t get into it.

Tales of Iron a decent game that has some good going for it but I couldn’t get into it. Gave it a good 3 hours but found it more frustrating than fun. Combat ranges from basic and boring to random and frustrating. Sound design is mostly good aside from the communication noises being grating enough to make me not want to talk to people. Art is fine, nothing to write home about but it has a style and sticks with it. Story (as far as I got into it) was also fine, kinda basic but a good enough wrapper for the experience.

The combat killed it for me. On normal difficulty, I was finding large enemy/boss attacks to be far too random. Enemies usually telegraph their attacks pretty well but what they actually do at the end of the telegraph would vary too often to actually learn how to react and I ended up just having to find ways to cheese them or just get lucky. After getting randomly killed by Red Wart a dozen times I decided it wasn’t worth my time to continue.

Hard bosses could be excused if the whole experience around them was good to begin with but the conversation chalkboard nails, annoying looting controls and dying to a 2 inch ledge fall after beating Bloki Magu and having to fight him all over again cause there's no post auto-save I was just done.

Not a bad game to pick up but was not an enjoyable experience so cant recommend.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a fine game that has some neat new features and quality of life improvements over its predecessor. If you liked the first, this one is more of the same and you wouldn’t be remiss in getting it. However, it has a lack of… something. I have a hard time describing exactly why I found this game to be less enjoyable than the first and I think it's probably a lack of direction perhaps?

JWE2 is very pretty, sounds good, controls well, has a lot of the same charm as the first one but it’s got less to it. I'm at 40+ hours of which I would say 10-15 hours of it was disappointing which is not a great percentage of play. The 'campaign', for example, was wholly uninteresting and felt more like a really drawn out tutorial. Two of the 'chaos' maps were super boring and the challenge maps are all just do the same thing over and over again with less time. After doing all of the campaign and all the chaos maps, it wasn’t until the last chaos map that lagoons and hybrids became readily available.

I dunno. I can't really give it a downvote as there's not anything really wrong with it (though I have run into a couple bugs and one CTD) but I wish the game had done more to push the JWE franchise forward rather than offering a side grade.

If you're in it for the sandbox mode to just build a cool dino park, its an upgrade over JWE1. If you're in it for a story or interesting mechanics or something new; it may not be worth the buy if you already own the original.

Also the voice acting isn’t much better than the first. It definitely feels a lot less phoned in than the first but it's still pretty cringy and forced. Jeff was the worst offender this time but I feel it was more from the less-than-great script he was given then from his performance. Also, why is AJ LoCascio voicing Owen? Nothing against the guy but its uncanny valley to hear him try to sound like Chris Pratt…

DeMagnete is a fine if terribly short puzzle game that was enjoyable but has a lot of flaws to it. The game is fun enough that I would have given it a thumbs up except for its price to content ratio. At its list price of $20, I wholeheartedly recommend AGAINST the game and, even at the $8 I paid for it, I'm a little iffy. So if you can find it on a really good discount, I'd say it's still certainly worth picking up.

For its strong points:
- It's got a nice, decently crafted world that is fun to be in.
- Controls are customizable enough to satisfy everyone's needs.
- World sound is perfectly fine, nothing to write home about but I didn’t find anything too out of balance (other than Q's teleport sound).
- The puzzles are fun enough and I found myself well enough engaged to go back to it three times in a row when I had an hour or so to get back into VR.

However it does, unfortunately, have quite a few issues for a mid-to-late 2021 VR game:
- The length of the game is terribly short. There's an achievement to beat the game in 2 hours and I beat my first play through in just over 3 hours.
- The volumetric lighting is terrible. It's off by default and I don’t really know why they even left it in as an option.
- There's nothing built into the game to prevent you from taking cubes from one puzzle into the next so it's very easy to 'cheat' a lot of puzzle rooms by just taking a cube (or two) with you. Maybe this is intentional but it made the game even shorter when you can complete the entire last chapter in just a couple minutes by carrying cubes forward for example.
- The game doesn't explain its own mechanics very well. Figuring out the power cube took me a literal half hour because there was no explanation. I only figured it out through sheer dumb luck.
- Your companion Q is just a VR Navi. Why did I throw her in the lava; you know why and it wasn’t just for the achievement. She, unfortunately, serves no purpose as a companion that a button couldn’t do and be less annoying to boot.
- The lava boat puzzle(?) was far too slow paced. It was hardly a puzzle and really more like a simple maze. Found it to be terribly boring after the 'neat' factor quickly wore off.
- The game doesn't evolve much. A few new mechanics get introduced as it goes along but, for the most part, the entire thing is just magnetizing and repelling blocks. A game like this has soooo much potential and it never reaches anything beyond the very simple.

Overall, if you can find the game on a DEEP discount, it might hit the mark for a couple hours but don’t expect all too much. Price to content alone keeps it from being a recommendation. I enjoyed it enough to want to go back and get the rest of the achievements but selecting chapter 1 restarts the game and clears your chapter selection so that activity got axed but the game was fun enough to want to do some achievement hunting.

The Pathless is a 'neutral' recommendation from me. Despite my downvote, there's nothing inherently wrong with the game. The game is responsive, the controls work just fine, the world is pretty and the story is good enough. Unfortunately it's just not very fun or engaging. The Pathless is an open exploration game with mild puzzle elements, a couple things to collect and some boss fights.

The world is neat but a bit samey. Unlike most games where world-is-toy, The Pathless doesn't do a good job encouraging exploration and, instead, points the player at points of interest with a radar system and little else. Visual elements get mudded very easily since you're often in dense biome that shrouds all the points of interest (hence the radar system).

After 4 hours, movement throughout the world had hardly evolved and is done mainly through dashing about and shooting respawning spirit targets to refresh your dash meter. This is kinda fun at first but becomes tedious and downright frustrating when you want to explore an area that doesn't have any/enough targets to refresh your sprint, just requiring you to walk until you get back on the main path. Its not engaging either and is mostly just holding down the fire button until one gets auto-targeted, then release the button to rinse and repeat at infinium.

The puzzles are okay but nothing particularly challenging. There is only so much challenge that can be offered when everything in the world you can interact with highlights and auto-targets. Most puzzles were very obviously marked and telegraphed exactly what you needed to do so it was less problem solving and more going through the motions.

Lastly; there doesn't seem to be a way to fail. You don’t seem to be able to die in the game and, at most, if you do something wrong the character just gets knocked to the side, you stand back up and just do the same action again only slightly better this time. It was particularly disappointing for the boss fight once I realized there was no consequence for failure. Whether I avoided the balls of fire slamming into my face or not didn’t really make any difference to the end result; with no incentive to do well or drawback for doing worse, the victory felt extremely hollow.

That’s not to say it’s a bad game and you wouldn't be remiss for trying it. But its got so little depth and gameplay, I cant really recommend it persay.