Recent reviews by LilBlkCloud

Terrible corporate practice by SEGA, suddenly removing games from this collection. Now it's impossible to 100% it. Scumbag move.

I never played PoE 1 because I saw it was too fast and too easy for my liking. I need my games to be hard. I need a challenge. If something I'm doing for pleasure isn't a challenge, I get bored.

Some people, mostly don't want a challenge; they want to feel 'powerful' by accessing some level of near-invulnerability either accidentally or by following a YouTuber's instructions. I'm not one of those people. But for those people, they certainly don't have a shortage of games to choose from these days, do they? In the case of ARPGs, Diablo IV certainly will give them what they need: zero challenge, God Mode, and a power trip.

If you're a smart person who needs a challenge in your ARPG, this is the game to play, and I'm overjoyed to see that GGG has decided to 'correct' PoE 2's endgame by nerfing the hell out of certain key aspects. It shows they have integrity. It shows they have a vision and they're sticking to it, despite what a loud minority projects on social media.

GGG is staying the course, and in this era where studios constantly give in to social media pressure, I admire that. So I'll be playing this for some time.

What follows is a sort-of-spoilery Cliff's Notes of the introductory quest(s). But, let's be real... you've seen it all before.

1) You wake up in a generic warehouse after the introductory cinematic that explains what happened after you, a "Starborn" as a child, survived an attack with some other orphans. Some hippy guy in the warehouse comes in, can't remember his name, and says, "Hey, are you okay? Having that same dream again? So-and-so is waiting for you. Go find her." If this sounds generic and uninspired, that's because it is.

2) You go find this chick you know. You follow her to a training area to learn some basic combat mechanics. Narratively, why are you doing this? Who the **** knows.

3) Combat training is over. You follow the chick you know. There's an attack on the town. You fight some monsters with this chick you know. You run with her, using your 'Morph' ability to turn into a purple catlike thing. You fight some more monsters. You reach a dead end and she says, "Go on without me, I gotta help this comically abrasive dwarf guy here repair this broken-down barricade thing."

4) You go on without her. You meet your Pokemon spirit guy. No one else can see it. It's cute in that Asian way, saying cute things in a cute tone of voice that make no sense, so read the subtitles, which, by the way, the developers never bothered to match up with the spoken English. Want two versions of the same sentence in both audio and text simultaneously at all times during cutscenes for all characters? You've come to the right place.

5) You IT'S MORPHIN' TIME! to fly, but it's really just a glide. You meet another group down on the flat area by some ruins. There's a few new characters here, led by Great Value Harry Potter. He uses his wand to fight monsters and to clear the way of rubble, queuing up each new fight.

6) He clears the way to fight this giant King Something-or-Other Guy who is about to kill everyone, but you start to glow purple and **** and fell him with one mighty purple blow. WHAT IS DIS?! THIS IS SURELY MIRACLE! THIS IS VERY AMAZE!

7) You pass out. The power was too amazing!

8) You wake up. Folks are impressed with you. That chick you know was so worried apparently that she's brought to tears. At this I actually laughed out loud at my monitor because I have zero cares for this chick, or any of them for that matter, but here they all are, being all concerned, including the hippy guy who woke me up in the warehouse.

9) Great Value Harry Potter queues up his Pokemon to warp you away. Where? I don't ******* know.

10) Oh, it's the first real city/town place. End of introduction.

11) Oh, hey, there are some pings in my chat box. Notifications. This mechanic has been unlocked, that mechanic has been revealed.

12) Someone in chat says, "wat is spawning in 15 mins and where" and someone inevitably replies, "ur mom in ur room".

13) I open up the inventory. I open up the 'Codex'. I open up some other screens. Oh, hey, what's that? I have no ******* idea what any of these 38 different currencies do. But who's kidding whom? This is a Korean MMORPG. The sheer stupid number of them is meant to confuse me such that I'll just go, "Oh, **** it. I'll just click BUY on the e-monies."

LET THE NICKEL AND DIMING COMMENCE!!!

Uninstalled.

(Oh, how far my favorite genre has fallen.)

This is a no-BS review, brought to you by honesty.

TL;DR: FFXVI = we have Game of Thrones at home
FFXVI also = Devil May Cry at home, with great FF music and light (very light) item-usage and weapon/armor management

1) Story's well-conceived, but obviously the suits at SE said to Yoshida-san, "Copy Game of Thrones." And the similarities aren't just surface-level. There are actual key moments and characters ripped right out of GoT. This bothers me, because now I'm conflating FFXVI with GoT in my mind. On the one hand, SE thinks this is great because it was a 'safe' bet to yoink GoT. For the gamer/consumer, the product doesn't have its own unique identity. It's creative laziness. Also, as a writer, it pisses me off.

2) Soundtrack is killer. A masterpiece. Indeed, the score is so good that it proves distracting to me in the heat of battle. Good thing? You bet.

3) Performance sucks. Oh boy does it suck. It sucks so much that even as I'm playing the game, I don't feel like I'm experiencing it.

Yoshida warned us that the requirements would be steep, but they're more than steep, they're a mystery, and they're nigh unachievable. Forget about the official recommended requirements; SE lied.

You WILL need to run FSR, downscaling the hell out of everything to achieve framerates that at the very least won't induce migraines and motion sickness, AND you'll need to turn on frame generation, which will inevitably add input delay. This sucks in a game where the action is frenetic because in your mind, you'll be ten steps ahead of what your character is doing at all times. And don't get me started on that ghosty/fuzzy coating every character has as a result of FSR. Turn on "Native AA" to see what the game SHOULD look like; also, turn on Native AA to see just how catastrophically unoptimized the game is. Terrible. If this 'turn on FSR and frame generation always' trend becomes the norm, God help us. The lazy development is real.

4) Visuals. They're nice. Some people think they're god-tier. I don't see it. The environments aim for photo-realism, which I'm not a fan of. And then you've got these typically Square-designed character models walking around in them. FFXV's environments meshed with the characters flawlessly, in my opinion. This game is less balanced in that regard, and I'm betting this has everything to do with their obsession to emulate GoT. Lazy design.

I can't recommend this game. If the performance is improved, I will. But I doubt it will be improved significantly enough, if at all. Modern developers just don't care about optimization. What they do now is throw a bunch of crazy crap at the engine, slap a price on the game, and offer it to us. There is no polishing going on, no trimming of the fat.

Lazy.

Here are the things you want to hear, because these days a lot of you young and inexperienced gamers obsessively consume "gaming journalism" articles by folks who have no idea what journalism is, YouTube "takes" by randoms desperate for your clicks (and boy do you give it to them), and "what you heard" when you were piddling around on your phone.

1) The game is fun.
2) Microtransactions are not egregious.

There.

Now, read on for some details.

What is HELLDIVERS 2 like in layman's terms?

Put Left 4 Dead or Back 4 Blood in third person, set it in the far future where faster-than-light travel and galactic warfare are a thing, and slather it all in an authoritarian, fascistic, hyper-capitalist goo that, if it weren't hilarious, might make you feel icky.

If you're a Starship Troopers (1997) enjoyer, you're going to love this (I saw it in the theatre on opening week. Yes, I'm special. *sticks out tongue*). To be frank, it does shamelessly rip off Starship Troopers in countless ways, especially with the enemy design. I keep waiting for Johnny Rico to come marching toward me over the horizon, his Roughnecks enthusiastically in tow, yelling, "Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever?!"

The music is fantastic, with Basil Poledouris's influence felt rather heavily. You'll feel super pumped as you watch your pod descend toward the planet's surface, burning in the atmosphere in a brief pre-mission loading screen each time you drop. The visuals are top-notch, but customizable enough that just about any PC can run it acceptably. I'm running the game on my i7 7700k GTX 1080 machine at 1080p (latest drivers) and a mix of high/medium/low settings that look great, and I never dip below 60, even when things get chaotic.

The shooting mechanics are simple yet innovative enough to make things visceral each drop. Your reticle isn't the only factor you'll want to consider when you're mowing down bugs. There's a little bouncy sphere representing the heft and momentum of your gun that you'll want to prioritize. If you don't, you'll waste bullets, and in this game, that'll get you killed fast. Because when you're out, you'll have to call in more supplies, and that requires 'stratagems', accessing a menu mid-fight that involves keying in NES-era, cheat-code style commands: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, etc. Screw up the command and you'll have to start over. I can't tell you how many times, in my first couple hours, that I got lanced in the head by a bug while trying to call down supplies. And I laughed my a$$ off every time.

My issues with the game are few.

For one, I'm still, five hours later, desperately wanting a roll or dive command to avoid bug rushes. What the game does give you is a dive to prone... which really does squat for you against the majority of bugs you'll encounter, as their main tactic is to rush and melee you. Diving into prone only makes you a sitting duck. But hey, I'm open-minded. This is how the developers wanted it, so I'm going to try to adjust.

The matchmaking has also been an issue. However... I've always found that if I keep queuing up, eventually I'll get a stable match. I've played with many randoms in my five hours so far, and things aren't totally stable yet. Steam friends joining your game also seems to work rather flawlessly for me so far.

Also, yes, the game makes fun of the conservative American mindset, and yes, it's freaking hilarious. Call it "woke" if you want (stealing and perverting black folks' slang as usual), it's still hilarious, and the truths it puts on display cannot be denied.

All told, this is a fantastic game that respects your time and money. And so far it appears to me that it's run by a studio that gives a damn.

So, I say suit up. There's a lot of fun to be had here in the name of Super Earth.

P.S. My brother gifted me this game for the love of Starship Troopers. Thanks, bro. Love you.