Recent reviews by Wario

I must've had thousands of hours previously on this S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC. Last I played it was about 14 years ago, even before I signed up to Steam. It was the second best FPS I had ever played in my life, the first being Deus Ex.

Now, I bought the Steam copies for SoC, CS and CoP, and I'm planning on replaying all three of them, starting with SoC. And then, I'm going to play the latest in the series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 HoC. I'm going to have so much fun!

I'll see you all sometime in 2028.... (provided the lunatics in power haven't blown this world down to space rock sized chunks by then...)

HOL tries too hard to be like the Borderlands games - which by the way, are very well written, with intelligent humour - but fails to provoke a chuckle.

The jokes, if I could even call that, are cliché when at their best, and juvenile when at their worst. Overall, the dialogues come out as crass and become repetitively annoying as you carry on playing.

The sad part is that the combat is great, and the artwork is passable. I'll be getting a refund, for sure.

What can I say? It's simply unfair to compare it with Bioshock.

Bioshock 2 is a gem in its own right. But just like Bioshock, we'll probably never see games like these again. I say that not out of feelings of nostalgia, but based on what I can only describe as a sea of mediocrity and sheer incompetence in the gaming industry, especially in the last decade.

Very few games stood out like Bioshock 1 and 2 back in their day, telling a story and taking you out on a journey through it. Very few games stood out like these two, ever since they came out.

But oh well, I digress. Let people enjoy today's mediocre "coops", "survivals", "empty open worlds with nothing else in it", and whatnot. I can always come back from time to time, and say hello to these old games, and reminisce....

Wonderful game, the like of which we will probably never see again, sadly.

All the thought put into the story, and the work put into the development, and the whole team effort put into making a playable game out of this... it all just screams passion, dedication and, why not say, competence.

Report/Survey Number: 4456.87
Location: Fern Island
Subject: Base of operations, pupulation enthralment


Esteemed council members,


As you know, for the last two years I've been studying the viability of Fern Island to become one of our base of operations.

The immense area of the island itself provides for an extraordinary variety of all types of resources.

The vast flora with all its different species makes this island the perfect location for potion research and large scale manufacturing, and the absence of dangerous wildlife provides a safe environment for the gathering of plants and extraction of stones and minerals, not to mention powerful artifacts.

The people living/staying in the island, however, is what's been making my work and research somewhat challenging.

Most of the people in the Island are hippye tourists, and as such, not much use for us either via enthralment or material extraction. Because of their lifestyle, they are unintelligent, underdeveloped in terms of practical skills, and their bodies have been ultimately ruined due to heavy substance abuse. They are a drain to Barrow End itself: they sleep in the open at nights and roam around town on daytime, making a nuisance of themselves and not spending any money at any of the shops.

The island's native population is in a league of their own, and I don't mean that as a compliment to them, either.

I've got to know a few of them and even managed to establish a few amicable relationships by means of either simply saying "hello", bribing them with delicacies or potions, the completion of menial tasks and the delivery of items, among other things - even when these "items" are only a few steps from them, available in bulk quantities.

Below is a individual report on each of the residents I've become acquainted to:

CASSANDRA: Owns a flower shop. Quite frankly, I don't see how can a flower shop financially thrive in an island with so much variety of flowers and plants, but that's my own personal observation and irrelevant to the case.

From what I observed, she's a heavy drinker who spends every minute of her free time chain-drinking at the local pub. When I say "chain-drinking", I really mean it as in "chain-smoking": just like a chain smoker lights one cigarrette after another, she downs one full glass of whatever spirit she's served, one after the other. I wish I thought of pulling out my phone and filming it, it's quite unbelievable how can she still walk a straight line after hundreds of pints and chasers.


CHARNA: The only doctor in town. Responsible for "patching me up" after I "accidentally washed up at the beach after a storm". The things people will believe if you tell the story right...

Arrogant and full of contempt for magic and magic users. Many times I had to restrain my myself so not to force feed her one of my shape-shifting concoctions, and have her permanently transformed into a two-headed hedgemole with feathers instead of spikes and antlers on her head, and who feeds on other animal's faeces (and yes, I did create a potion for that).

Nobody likes her. Nobody even go to her for whatever treatment she offers, not even the tourists.

She completes a daily pilgrimage, first to Cassandra's flower shop, where she stands for a couple of hours of day staring at the seeds and honey jars, while Cassandra looks at her awkwardly, as if trying to politely tell her to leave and stop driving away the few customers that enter her flower shop.

After that, she heads to the Mayor's office, where she stands for an hour or so, until 5 PM when the office closes for the day. The Mayor herself can't stand the doctor and always sneaks out earlier, and can be found at the town square, wandering nervously and waiting for the doctor to finally leave.


MIRUTA: typical overworked/underpaid civil servant. Has a penchant for spilling coffee over important documents, unaware it's precisely her coffee addiction which is interfering with her motor coordination. She's a hard working, good and honest soul, surrounded by the town's headless cuflows, a.k.a "residents". It's a miracle she still manages to run the town by herself, with such efficiency and with no help at all.


URUSHU: runs the museum above the Mayor's office. A museum nobody ever visits, but who's counting? He certainly isn't. He's too obsessed with artefacts and excavation sites to acknowledge anyone else around him, including his long suffering wife and his rebellious teenage daughter, both craving his attention but still getting no reaction from him.

By the way, about 90% of his exhibition was excavated and hauled over by yours trully. Just for the record.


YUTU: Town's only fisherman, runs the local fish/angling shop with his teenage sister. Great cook, if not a bit clumsy with his choice of ingredients. On one occasion, he almost fatally poisoned half the town, for picking mushrooms where , when and how he shouldn't have. I think he learned his lesson. Scratch that. I HOPE he's learned that lesson, at least.


ROGOST: Oh, where do I start. Forty-something, rapidly approaching middle age, but still thinks he's 20, thinks he's in his prime and the gods' gift to women all over the island (particularly women young enough to be his daughters). Highly conceited, he cannot help but to make himself the topic of every conversation. Over the course of his life, he excelled in building as many houses as he did muscles, the latter at the expense of developing his gray matter and brain cells. In his defence, he's an alright kind of builder, although he left a huge mess behind for me to clean up, everytime I had to hire him for home improvements.


FRITA: misanthrope hermitress who dables in magic and potions, but lacks the drive and discipline required to become a bona-fide witch. Lives in the outskits of Barrow End. Quite unfriendly most the time, only tolerates my presence when she wants something from me.


SIEMIBOR: the only neighbour to Frita. Local priest and religious cuckoo. Just like every other religion follower, he goes around preaching and believing his own mumbo-jumbo, winding up engulfed by some sort of parallel existence where his gods talk to him and offer him guidance. He's old, and far too gone to be of any use to us.


HORACE: Farmer living in the outskirts of town. Too old to run his own farm, constantly enlists the help of his neighbour Tulok in order to keep it running. Likes to complain about everything, to anyone who passes by and lends him an ear. I learned my lesson the first time, so I rarely stop by now, lest he'll get me to fend off the hedgemoles that took over his farming entire land.


TULOK: Tzoru farmer, pet store owner, and local vet. Has extense, admirable knowledge of his craft. Loves his animals. If I were to play cupid, I'd match him and Miruta together, to lighten each other's load. Two remarkable persons, drowning in a sea of mediocrity.


I believe that the remaining residents don't require any substantial analysis. They're all pretty much forgetable, or play insignificant roles in this whole ecosystem.

A final observation: with exception of Urushu and his wife, all residents are currently single. But not "ready to mingle", if you know what I mean. Maybe it's just their social ineptitude, which is pretty much apparent in every interaction I have or ever had with them. Maybe they are all too clannish. Maybe both?

This concludes my report.


Yours Sincerely
Moly McLongChin
Fern Island WWC Outpost

PS.: I'm yet to receive my latest shipment of Youth Potion. I kindly ask that you please check with the courier, as I'm running dangerously low on these. We don't want the locals to find out I'm actually 183 years old, as that would jeaopardize the whole mission. Or, please give me the recipe, I will make the potion myself.

FINAL REVIEW 16/08/21

After 150 hours, I've finished the game. I believe I completed every single mission and found every single location on every region.

I'm quite underwhelmed, really. Took me a very long time to get decent weapons, and as I mentioned, it all came a bit too little, too late.

Crafting is still stupidly pointless. Only a few hours ago I found the schematics to make grenades for the launcher. Now that I finished the game. Feels like saying "you stick all that where the sun don't shine!", but who am I going to say that to?

Anyway, I have nothing else to say about this game, except that I really wanted to say I liked it, but I begrudge saying that. It's a slap-dash, free time, coffee break attempt to make a FPS. It could've been so much better had the devs poured a bit of love into it.


***

UPDATE 11/08/21

I've been soloing GZ for 128 hours and having fully explored 5 regions (Archipelago, Farmlands, South Coast, Mountains and Marshlands), I'm now half-way through the North Coast, with Forest being the last region to complete.

Like I said before - if you care to read all the way down to the end - the ginormous and quite beautiful open world is more than enough to keep you busy for weeks if not months, depending on how many playthroughs you can stomach, or how much of a achievement hunter you are.

The combat can sometimes be challenging and the AI quite smart, though the fun is easily spoiled by screwed up navmesh, where enemy NPCs get lost or stuck in places.

Weaponry sucks for the most part: I only managed to get me some nice guns after around 80 hours, which is too late and most people would have (rage) quit by then. It all feels as if it came a bit too late, as I would've enjoyed having some proper firepower earlier on in my playthrough.

Crafting still sucks even where I'm at. I shouldn't have bothered with it, really. I managed to craft a 4% bullet resistance jacket, and it doesn't make any difference. Schematics are too far in between, which is true also for ammo schematics.

I also don't understand why the limitation to only two slots for weapons. That's inadequate to say the least. You need to access your inventory mid-combat if you want to switch to some other weapon other than the two already allocated.

Also, switching weapons and items looks quite sedated on-screen due to painfully slow animations. It becomes an irritant before too long, particularly in situations when you are shooting and need to quickly switch to binoculars to spot other nearby enemies before they spot you.

Also the general interface is terrible to deal with: there's a noticeable lag when you access the inventory screen, and transferring things from inventory to storage causes the items list to refresh on every transferred item, messing up the previous sorting order and scrambling items you had your eyes on, making you waste time and effort locating them again on the list.

The devs also reused a lot of assets throughout the game: houses, vehicles, bunkers, they all look the same everywhere. You can understand that on games that use procedurally generated maps, but on this game it just looks budget, lazy and cut-corner-ish.

I thought I'd finally change my mind and recommend this game, particularly because I played so much of it, but I cannot really tell anyone to play it and keep a straight face while saying it.



***

UPDATE 04/08

I've done 20+ more hours on it. Just noticed it's not only me getting stuck in places. For different reasons, enemy NPCs also get stuck on all sorts of locations, but this is probably due to glitchy navmesh, or lack of anything preventing NPCs going where they're not supposed to.

It's particularly frustrating on boss fights, I spend a lot of time devising a plan on how I'm going to tackle a high level tank, laying mines, finding a safe place to hide from missiles and going out to lure it over to my well laid trap, and after all the anticipation and excitement, I find that the ****** took a glitchy path and got stuck among the trees.

Adding to that, NPCs are somehow teleporting into buildings I'm hiding in, during combat. One example: I'm inside a barn, one door opened, shooting out at enemies, then suddenly I'm getting shot at by a FNIX Hunter that somehow spawned right beside me. You'd think they're just getting through the door, but they're actually ignoring walls and going through them.

Something else I forgot to mention is also the physics is screwed up. You throw a grenade and it gets stuck on the ground or at the door, rather than bouncing or rolling away. Or you aim to toss a flare a couple of meters from you, and it goes past 20 meters away off the mark instead.

At his point I have learned how to counter that as I already know thrown objects will behave oddly, but I shouldn't have to get out of cover and hand deliver a grenade over to enemy NPCs if I want to effectively hit them, should I?

Seriously, they didn't do much work on this game, did they?

I mean, it's a huge and beautiful open world, which as I already said I really love, I love the sandbox aspect of it, I love the day/night cycles and weather effects, I love the environment, but as for playability, sure they didn't finish the bloody game, did they?



***

FIRST REVIEW 31/07

It's funny what inspires me to write a game review, sometimes. I don't feel as compelled to write a positive review about something, as I feel I should write a negative one. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because I believe I might be acting as somebody's "saviour" of sorts, or it's just because I want to vent out my frustrations. Probably the latter.

But as I am now, for the millionth time, stuck inside another yet container because obviously this game's general collision detection utterly sucks, right there with controls and interface, I really, really have to let it all out. So if you're a fanboy, you might want to call mommy or daddy to help you through this very difficult moment as you read me tearing strips off this piece of **** of a game. Or you might skip it altogether and just give it a thumbs down, I honestly could not care less either way, even if I tried (which I won't).

I have as of now 65 hours invested into this game. And I could spend another 65 hours just ranting about how I think it sucks ***** sometimes.

But then, there are a lot of things I love about it. The humongous world to explore, the level of combat difficulty, yeah, they've got a couple of things right at the very least and to be fair.

But ye gods, there are so many other things I hate about it. Other than getting stuck in places, of course. For example, pistols: unless you play on baby mode or as they say, "for the story", I have not found any use for them so far, after unlocking the whole Archipelago and Farmlands regions.

Also, crafting: there is absolutely no point in bothering with it, at this point I'd love to be able to craft some much needed AP ammo, and all I can craft so far is the entry level .32 pistol ammo. Absolutely ridiculous to offer crafting and not allow players to use it. And don't get me started on clothing/armor.

The whole crafting in this game is just stupid. I have recycled countless amounts of items and ammo, I have thousands of each crafting material, and 65 hours into the game, having unlocked two whole massive regions, there is not a single crafting recipe to be found, other than the occasional clothing schematic you find on bosses, but that you cannot craft because you need yet another schematic that you don't have yet.

I'd like to suggest the devs that they get their **** together and fix this ****, but you know what, that is just as pointless as playing this **** of a game.

If you are in need of anger and frustration in your life, more than what Covid restrictions have already brought in, then help yourself to this ****, and smack your keyboard at will until you break your desk in two and fracture your hands in the process, if that's your thing.

0/10

The Outer Worlds... Now, where do I start?

I'll start with the disclaimers: 1) what I write in here is my own opinion, and 2) possible spoilers ahead. There are many other things people could be doing with their time other than reading stuff they don't agree with and finding out about in-game stuff before they wanted to. With that said, let's continue...

I have the impression that the team who developed TOW was aiming pretty high, but budget constraints and white collar executives got in the way as usual, and spoiled it for everybody else.

Other than being (in my opinion) a mediocre console port with all it's console hardware impairments and limitations ported over, the game feels unfinished and it seems a lot of content was crudely severed at it's final stages of development.

The companion AI is plain stupid. Where their behaviour settings read "Passive/Defensive/Aggressive", in reality it is "Dumb/Dumber/Suicidal", particularly true when playing on Supernova - which by the way is the only difficulty setting to go, if you want half a challenge.

If you put them on Passive or Defensive and hell breaks loose, they just stay around as if nothing's happening, they won't take cover and worse, they place themselves between you and enemy NPCs, taking fire from both sides. Put them on Aggressive and first thing they do is charge a Sprat when you're trying to sneak past a Mantiqueen. You get the picture.

The companions themselves, with the exception of Parvati and maybe Felix, are pretty annoying and totally forgettable. I only took them on their very own quests and only for the sake of getting that much needed XP out of that.

There are lots of stuff copy-pasted from other games, the more charitable among you may call it "references", I just call it blatant stealing ideas already seen in other games because they couldn't damn well come up with something new.

I could make a long list of stuff they put in there which I've seen on FONV, Deus X Human Revolution, Mass Effect and others, but I can't be bothered, really. Even Guild Wars 2 has been stolen from: the Mantiswarm is nothing but almost a carbon-copy of the Mordrem Troll Insect Swarm from GW2.

Anyway, the only two locations I enjoyed was Monarch and Tartarus. Had the dev team pushed through to deliver the remaining part of the game they abandoned, it would probably be a good game in the end. It's kind of frustrating seeing so many locked out locations/planets and not being able to land on them and explore at least.

Does it have any replay value? I don't think so. I might start another playthrough only to get a few achievements, but maybe I won't even bother, as the consequences to whatever choices are pretty easy to predict, and not very exciting to experiment with.

So, to finish it off, I'd give this game a fair score of 6/10.

So, I reached a point where I have around 40-something hours invested in this game, which I think qualifies me to say what I think of it so far.

One thing I've been reading people complaining about is how meh the story is. I mean, come on! It's Borderlands! This franchise has never been known for having a Oscar winning back story to start with.

In every instalment, the story is: four badass vault hunters set out to find and open the next Vault and claim it's riches, whilst fighting villains and their hordes who want just about the same thing. What kind of brilliant story were people expecting from BL3?

I for one think that, storywise, BL3 is just like BL, BL2 and BL:TPS, and I personally would not want or expect it to change drastically into some sort of soap opera with heart-wrenching, tear-jerking moments.

One criticism I have against this franchise is regarding the "Tales of the Borderlands" point-and-click garbage, which is something I refuse to call a "game" and thus, I wasn't even remotely interested in playing, but unfortunately for people like me, that is where they either introduced new characters into the franchise or killed off characters such as Scooter, which is a sad event I'm still very sore about.

And this takes me to one out of two faults I see in BL3, the first being: no Scooter! I don't mind Ellie, but I always looked forward to finding Scooter in game and interacting with him. That came out wrong.

Anyway, I can't get myself to care less about Lilith having her powers sucked out of her, because I always thought she's an arrogant ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and she had it coming, the same I never cared much for Roland "Mr. Charisma", and it didn't really bothered me when he died in BL2.

Now, Scooter being removed like that, in a lame story driven little adventure which I don't believe many true Borderlands fans really point-and-clicked through; that, dear sir or madam, I cannot forgive. To my comfort, at least he didn't die hung upside down from a telephone pole, covered in honey, and left to a slow death at the hands of hungry spiderants.

And well, they didn't kill Moxxi, Brick, Mordecai, Tannis, Mr. Torgue and also CrapStrap! He's a smart ass but the game would feel pointless without him. I haven't got to the part where something bad happens to any of them, I'm hoping none of that happens.

Now the second thing that is driving me a bit mad is that the devs made those huge maps with very, very long main missions in them, but only one or two side missions! This lack of variety in missions makes the whole game quite dull, and shows that the devs, rather than put more hours of work into the game by adding more diverse content, have opted to simply bloat maps and stretch main missions in order to make up for the lack of side missions. There is talk going 'round that they haven't been paid yet after working on making BL3, if that's true then that's sad, for both them and people like us who paid for the game and got an incomplete product because the bosses screwed up on the payroll.

Anyway, back to the game, regarding general gameplay and playability, I have had no big issues other than a very long initial loading and the occasional freeze, all of which was solved once I switched down to DX11. It did not make a difference to me graphics wise, unless I was picky and would moan about some generic item has lost some graphic detail when looking at it from 100 feet away.

That's it for now. This is probably not my final review, and I will probably get back to this, and add or rectify a few things. Or probably not. Who cares, anyway.

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

First of all, I know this is by now an ancient game as far as game age standards go (out in 2016) and it's probably pointless to review it, but I'm doing it anyway because I need to get this out of my system.

Second, the game itself is shorter than its own end credits. Yeah, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but if you played the game to end, then you know how ridiculously fast you can actually complete the game and how painfully dragged-out the end credits are, not to mention the facts A) you can't skip the credits, and B) you won't get your achievements if you ALT+F4 out of the game.

That said, after sitting through 30 minutes of an endless list of rolling names and ugly photos, I can't help but to ask myself, did all those people get paid in pizza? There are certainly thousands of names in there, which begs the question: did that game even make enough money to pay for all the pizza they consumed during its development?

Anyway on to the game: if you're a real fan of the Deus Ex games, you will probably feel that there should be more to it than there was.

I admit I missed a good few side quests on my first playthrough, which I completed in about 30 hours. So let's say I could have done it all in 35 hours with all side quests, which by my standards it's a bit short. That is not to say I did not enjoy the game, because I did, and I was very thorough in my exploration and everything, also hunting for achievements at the same time (only the cool ones, of course).

So let's get to the story line: you work for Interpol's Task Force 29, and on the intro mission you start out in Dubai at the now derelict Panchaea site, and Jensen is there to crash a arms deal party. If you remember DE:HR then you know that Panchaea was the ground zero of the aug incident, two years earlier.

After that, you end up in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. And that is where most of the game actually happens. I was a bit disappointed at that because I was expecting to go to other urban areas, different cities and all that. But there are tons of exploring to be done in Prague alone, even though the map itself is quite small.

As you progress through the main quest, you're dropped into Golem City (an aug ghetto), then come back to Prague at night time, which unlocks the brothel area and a bit more exploration. After that you go somewhere in Switzerland to a clandestine ex-Belltower facility from which you have to escape, then off you go back to Prague again, this time under a curfew, making sight seeing a bit trickier. For the final mission you go to London, but only inside a building. No exploration of urban areas or whatsoever.

So let's say this game happened in 4 different locations, but only Prague was fully "explorable".

In London, after one boss fight, that's it. Now if I remember correctly, and I might be wrong regarding the number because I'm too lazy to go refresh my memory with the help of the wiki, the previous game had FOUR boss fights, and many different, explorable locations.

The story itself is great, quite tense at times, the Eidos Montreal team did an awesome job at conveying it. Also, loads of cliffhangers, which points to a possible sequel.

One of the things that went right above my head on my first playthrough is that there is a possibility that the "real" Adam Jensen died at Panchaea, so the one I played was quite possibly a clone. Clues for that theory are 1) Jenses disappeared for a year and had no memory of what transpired during that time, having waken up/escaped from somewhere in Alaska, 2) Sarif said that his augments installed on Jensen had serial numbers and would be easy to trace and so identify him as Adam Jensen, 3) Hele/Eliza pointed out that "that version of Adam Jensen was incompatible with the one she knew, 4) Torso/Head found inside a Versalife cryo-container, whose face resembled Jensen, meaning there could be more clones.

Gameplay is alright, a bit too much of the "snap to cover" aid, just like in the previous game. Being that it is a console port, that feature is obviously inherited from controller limitations, the awkward map system being another example of console handicaps brought into the PC environment.

The graphics are very good, animations not so much, they did reuse a lot of assets from the previous game. Another complaint I have is that they forgot the silent choke takedown. It would've been handy to have a way to silently take enemies down and away other than stun gun, which wasn't very silent by the way when NPCs go AH-DUR-DEE-GUH-GAH-GUR-BAH-GAH-GAH-GAH-DOH-BOO-ERR-NAH-GEE-DAH-MAH-DER-DOH-GAH and then finally drop down, sometimes going gobbly-dee-♥♥♥♥ even after they're unconscious.

Body dragging was another issue, pretty bugged with NPCs getting stuck eveywhere, not very efficient if there is another NPC coming just around the corner and you need a fast way to get rid of bodies laying around.

Other than that, the now instant classic glitch "NPCs stuck into walls or sitting in the air when there's a chair right beside them". Seen that on quite a few games lately, seems to be the new normal for developers to let ♥♥♥♥ like that pass the QC (or maybe there's no QC at all).

Anyway, the game is mostly very good, but with a few minor snags.

I'd say I give it 8/10, but who cares? Just play it and make your own mind about it.

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

You start playing as Arthur, apparently working at a news room, censoring news articles, and not a clue is given as to who you are as a person, what your objectives are, what's been done to you or what you've done to anyone (if anything), and so on.

Out of fear of running into spoilers that would ruin my experience, I opted to play the game not doing any research on Wikis and Steam forums, which didn't do much for my experience due to the fact that the backstory is so poorly laid out at the beginning. You leave a very nice and tidy city via the sewers, and emerge through a hatch, out into a Fallout-ish wasteland. All that because you didn't take your pills and people went ballistic on you. I just wanted to understand why...

At some point you'll finally acquire the understanding that Arthur wants to get to Germany in order to reunite with his younger brother, who was sent there for some reason, along with apparently every other child under the age of 13. Why? No idea, that was never explained in any of the chapters, not even at the end of the game.

Further on, if out of confusion and frustration you haven't abandoned the game yet, you'll get that Britain lost WW2 to Germany some 20 years before, with the Germans leaving all but a few select towns in ruins. Those few selected towns are where some of the British citizens have been pacified via some sort of strong anti-depressant called "Joy", which everybody should take religiously, lest you be taken for a "Downer" and beaten to death by everybody else. That explained why Arthur was chased out of his home town.

The plot was to me somewhat confusing from beginning to end, and I feel it could have been so much better. There was potential for a masterpiece there, somewhere. But as it happens with many independent titles, mismanagement and incompetence must take the lead at some point, and things go tits up.

As you finish the game with Arthur finally making a dramatic escape out of Wellington Wells, just when you think "Well, that was it, game finished", a Second Act starts with Sally, which was previously a love interest NPC for Arthur. It would all be ok, I imagined, carrying on playing with a new character with a new set of skills and new storyline, except that apparently you'll now be burdened by the load of a annoying baby, which you'll have to feed and change every so often. That is when I signed off, because as Rochelle Rock would say: "I'MA TAKING CARE OF NO BABIES!".

Edit 27/07/20

Against my best judgement, I decided to carry on playing as Sally, even with the baby sitting annoyance. I love the looting and sneaking around part of the game and that was enough to bribe me into it again, plus I've got nothing better to play at the moment.

So here we have Sally, a young woman with a penchant for having sexual encounters with old men - Arthur's father, General Byng, Dr. Verloc, the chemist up the road, and the list probably goes on and on and on - who ended up pregnant at some point and doesn't seem so sure as to who's the father, because she was, you know, high on drugs most the time. At a certain point, probably by doing the "eeny, meeny, miny, moe" test, she decides to pin it on poor Dr. Verloc, so yeah, he's the daddy, apparently...

So "oh poor me, young single mother, alone against patriarchism and sexism in this men's world" Sally, still having not learned her lesson, goes on using her sex appeal, preferably with older men, to get what she wants the easy way. In her spare time, she doubles as drug crafter and dealer, supplying the bobbies and other addicts in town with a range of flavoured highs.

Hard to feel any kind of sympathy for either her or conniving Arthur, who basically used lies and deceit to have his younger special needs brother sent in his place on a train to Germany for God-knows-what. So, Arthur and Sally sort of deserve each other, really. Two absolute scoundrels.

Edit 31/07/20

The completionist in me pushed me to finish Ollie's playthrough, and so I did it today. A lot shorter than the previous 2 acts, so that wasn't too painful. This time I didn't care for sneaking, choking or using any non-lethal weapons or methods. I just went full berserk on everything that moved, and it was the best playthrough of all, very satisfying indeed.

Turns out Margaret wasn't Ollie's daughter, but Jack Worthing's. They were neighbours. Jack tried to hide his daughter from the Germans, but Ollie turned her in, and shot her when she ran. What a s.o.a.b., no wonder everybody hated him.

But you know what, I like Ollie. He's got my kind of attitude towards people. I loved the ending, when he flew off in a hot air balloon to Scotland, cursing and pissing down on everybody below. I'd love an opportunity to do that, except of course I'd be heading elsewhere other than Scotland. Nothing against Scotland, I'd just chose a different destination, a bit more sunny.

End of Edit


Now for the pros and cons:

PROS:

+ Sneaking around at night is great and can be challenging, mostly but to glitchy NPCs that sometimes spawn in large numbers out of nowhere and get stuck in places where you need to go. But that makes it even trickier, which I particularly like.

+ Crafting is great, once you finally get to unleash its full potential around mid-game, by finding useful recipes. Some of those recipes only come up close to the end of each act, which is stupid, you don't get an opportunity to make the most of them. But you can always add them via console, if you wish to have them earlier.

+ The Make Believes! I find myself whistling the tunes around the house, they're very catchy! Would be nice to have a radio like in the Fallout games, so I could listen to them whilst playing.

+ Huge open world maps, lots to explore and plenty of side quests.


CONS:

- Veeeeeery sloooooow and confusing start. Not much you can do until you reach the first town and can start selling loot, getting new crafting recipes and actually craft something useful, doing more quests to get more skill points.

- Plenty of immersion-breaking glitches: NPC pile-ups, erratic NPC behaviour such as moonwalking into walls, sitting in the air where there's no seat, dead/unconscious bodies popping out of nowhere, and so on.

- Events that occurred between two main characters happened at different locations for either character on their own act, also with slightly different lines and actions. One example is the cod liver oil event, which happened at Sally's apartment during Arthur's act, then on Sally's act it happened in the Garden District, with her even revealing to Arthur that she had a baby. So yeah, a case of "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" during development.

- Combat is melee only, which is ok but it would've been nice to have the option to shoot at NPCs rather than only either smacking them or blowing them up.


Aaaaaaand.... that's it.

Anyway, I do recommend this game because it kind of grew on me halfway through. So if you persevere, you'll find that is a nice game and worth playing.