Recent reviews by Nipukka

Very late to the party but might as well leave a review after completing the entire game.

This is a wonderful game. It's a lot of fun to explore Egypt with how well the world has been crafted. There are a lot of breathtaking sights and interesting locations to find. The main character, Bayek, is a good character with stellar voice acting who remains good throughout the game.

Once you've played dozens of hours you can start to recognize the reused assets used to create areas but it hardly detracts from the overall experience. There's still a lot of different assets that give towns a good amount of clutter to look at.

The map is vast and takes a long time to go through. The open world activities are pretty limited though and repeat themselves over and over. The combat is perfectly serviceable, albeit a bit clunky at times. Overall it's just enjoyable to roam around Egypt, clearing forts and completing quests along the way.

Enemy archers are pretty annoying though. They have 100% accuracy and backpedal away from you at full speed. Healing in this game is also difficult to come by so I don't recommend playing on hard like I did. That difficulty is just not very fun until you know every enemy's moveset well enough to parry or dodge them all.

If you didn't like open world or ubisoft games before then this game isn't going to convince you otherwise. Purely mechanics wise this game is merely alright but as an overall experience it's one I will never forget.

There are just too many tedious gameplay mechanics in this game. Ammo switching is perhaps the worst of them. Several different ammo types to be used on specific enemies is just an awful idea. Having to use AP rounds on everything and exclusively hit only headshots to do effective damage makes combat repetitive very quickly.

Perks and abilities like faster crouch speed, grenade takedowns etc. being tied to random gear loot is another baffling decision. Even explosives are categorized into "effective against humans" and "effective against vehicles". Having specific equipment to take down vehicles is normal but going as far as to differentiate frag grenades and dynamites from one another is asinine.

There are various materials that you need to find in order to craft attachments to your weapons. I'd have preferred it if they instead locked attachments behind levels, clearing a certain number of outposts, finding blueprints or specific challenges while using that weapon. Something like that. But instead you are constantly starved for materials if you want to try out many different weapons.

It's just not really the same fun experience of far cry sandbox that I enjoyed in 3, 4 and to a lesser extent in 5.

Here is my "Quality of Life" review

Very rewarding and fun rhythm game with a bit of a learning curve. I'm not even a great player, I can only deal with one step above normal difficulty in this game but it's still very satisfying to play.

This game stuttered on release but not anymore, at least for me. And don't trust the values for lag config that the game gives you. I'm playing on a monitor and still had to put my lag config to something ridiculous like -70 to hit notes properly.

The game also loads up very quickly which is a plus. I can load into a song before the steam overlay notification at the start fades away.

A player leaving a positive review. Never a bad thing

Abhorrent story, writing full of contradictions and plot holes, only a few interesting characters and many other annoyances.

But all that can be cast aside with a fat stack of mods. The game shines in its exploration, combat and crafting. There's a lot of verticality in the exploration and many unmarked and marked locations to discover. The shooting is leaps and bounds above previous Fallout entries. I can no longer play New Vegas because I've been spoiled by the combat in this game even if NV has vastly superior writing and characters.

Explore > Loot > Build and craft when you can no longer carry more junk. Repeat. That's the game in a nutshell and it is a very satisfying loop.

There are a lot of things wrong with this game. Voiced player character and a forced family backstory are the biggest mistakes by far. In my 400+ hours of gameplay I have not once gone to the institute because I couldn't care less about my son. The """""plot twist""""" that awaits there is also blatantly clear to see in advance. The institute's motivations are confusing and almost nothing in this game stands up to even surface level scrutiny in terms of making sense.

But I can live with that since the open world is crafted in such an excellent way and exploring it is an absolute joy.

In short, Your Mileage May Vary.

Dreadfully slow and unresponsive combat. Thugs are way faster than batman in this game and I was spending most of my time just countering during combat because if you strike at an enemy who is about to attack you, they will land their hit first almost every single time. A post in an old forum thread I found sums this up better than I ever could:

"Fighting used to be a beautiful, rhythmic activity. Now it's about finishing a move and bracing for another surprise pop-up counter prompt to appear. If you try to actively engage enemies in your own terms, a counter prompt will appear off the beat and the game will simply assign you damage and break Freeflow. Countering moves while performing other moves, known as cancelling, to deal with incoming thugs is just not the same, something was changed: be it the thugs' close-in segments of their attack animations have been sped up, Batman's move's recovery segments have been shortened or maybe even the counter move effect segment is misplaced in the frameset, causing you to miss the counter if you press it too early or too late during the performance of a different move. I'm not sure what it is, but whatever it is, fighting is just not what it used to be."

It isn't unplayable but it is boring.

This game has unbelievably infuriating dialogue. Claptrap is somehow ten times as annoying in the first five minutes than he was in the entirety of BL2. Humour is awful and most characters are dreadful to listen to. So about two hours in I deleted the dialogue files and that drastically increased my enjoyment of the game.

No longer do I need to listen to my character grunt every single time that I perform a jump or have to stand still listening to two blockheads exchanging pointless dialogue between each other just so I can move on with the story. With the dialogue deleted it instantly skips every line and even though you still need to wait for all the animations to finish it's much faster than waiting for them to finish speaking the dialogue.

I don't even know what Ava sounds like. And I'd like to keep it that way.

The sound effects and music is still there and it's quite nice to be able to focus on them 100% without any dialogue to interrupt.

It's clear that this game has a lot of effort and passion behind it when looking at the great level design and smoothness of gameplay. So far I've only played as the Gunner but I look forward to playing all the other classes.

With dialogue this game is a 4/10

Without dialogue it is easily a 9/10

Mods give this game nearly endless content. And Skyrim is perhaps still the only open world game with this much player freedom. You're only locked out of shouts if you don't want to do the main quest so you can really just go whatever direction you want at any point.

Whereas in a game like AC: Odyssey for example you have to do the main questline or you are locked out of crucial skills.

And I actually play the game with mods instead of just browsing for more like a lot of people seem to do.

My skyrim folder is 300gb

And the special edition is very stable (if you know what you're doing and don't go uninstalling or adding script-heavy mods mid-playthrough). I've only crashed one single time during my latest 60 hour save so far.

I wanted to like this game but it's clear that I am not willing enough to trudge through the tedious parts.

Sound design and environments make this a gorgeous and atmospheric game. I really enjoyed the beginning and the first two minibosses. The ogre was slightly annoying but not too bad. I also really liked the boss on the horse, what an exhilarating and fun fight.

But the game just went downhill fast after that.

Blazing bull. What an awful fight. Got it on my 4th or 5th attempt but that doesn't change how terrible it is. Then I ended up in a dungeon and tried to fight a shaman type miniboss. Gorgeous visuals wasn't enough to offset the tankiness of the boss compared to how quickly you die from terror. Had my fill after around three attemps at it.

Then I cleared an area that you revisit, sneaking around and stealth killing everyone before taking on a spear-wielding miniboss. I die to him in under 15 seconds. Which would be fine if each attempt at him wouldn't cost several minutes of my time since all the regular enemies respawn and you have to clear them all for another attempt. Apparently you can sneak towards the tower and stay on top of the staircase to avoid aggro from the normal enemies but that confines you to a very small space and restricts your movement massively. Also boring.

So I head off to dance around some rooftops, carefully taking out a bunch of feathery ninjas before getting instantly blown up by a kamikaze guy followed up by another kamikaze from a kite ninja. Not very pleasant. So instead of going back I decide to attempt the miniboss on top of the stairs. I take out one deathblow by stealth and proceed to get turned into swiss cheese by the posse of gunmen by his side. Again, not very pleasant. Apparently you can take out the gunmen with shurikens but that costs resource and is tedious to do, especially if you have to do several attempts at the miniboss.

Frustrated by these setbacks I head off to hirata estate. A fun level with some really nice fire visuals. I enjoyed tussling with the thieves, learning their patterns and deflecting arrows while finding a couple of shinobi tools along the way. I start to enjoy myself once more until I meet yet another miniboss by the name of Juzou the Drunkard.

Much like the earlier minibosses, this guy is also surrounded by his own personal militia of shield dudes, torch dudes, archers and regular dudes. You can't cleanly stealth them all because they are standing out in the open, all facing the same direction and John Sekiro is a shinobi who is literally unable to take out a dude silently. You can pop some funky candy to become almost invisible but John Sekiro will always stand up after a stealth kill. And this is one of those games where standing up is instant detection and crouching is the magic button that enables stealth.

I gave this encounter a couple attempts. You have an NPC that helps you and draws aggro and while it seems doable enough, I was also not enjoying myself in the least. Sprinting and leading on the enemies is easy enough but you can't really take on more than one at a time because there's simply too many overlapping attacks to deflect them all. So all you can do is just hope one enemy sprints ahead so you can quickly deplete his posture and deathblow him before the rest of the militia follows.

And each time you'd die to this boss you'd have to clear out this clown posse over and over again. That's three minibosses in a short period of time that all have a tedious militia of trash mobs around them just for the sake of tedious and dare I say artificial difficulty. I know that term riles up the staunch FROM fanboys but I think it's a term that perfectly describes these encounters.

I loved the first miniboss. I didn't even do the free stealth hit on him because I enjoyed fighting him so much despite getting my ass kicked a few times. The second one was also fine enough since his militia was more dispersed and I was able to take cover from the archers inside a building while engaging in an epic 1v1 duel against him.

But the subsequent minibosses have shown what kind of difficulty this game likes to throw at you. And that's the same kind of tedious and artificial difficulty Dark Souls 2 is known for, gank squads. Facing hordes of normal enemies is admittedly difficult for its own reasons but its the kind of difficulty that I find to be incredibly tedious and not enjoyable. Especially when the hordes of enemies are glued to a boss type enemy. You can use the firecracker tool to help out a little bit but even that is on a limited resource.

I tried to love this game. Deflecting feels great and the atmosphere is amazing. I was hungry for more and I was eager to see more of the game. But the miniboss militias have completely ruined the game for me. And from what I've read this design philosophy carries on throughout the entire game. I wish I could just instantly skip to the main bosses so I could continue to have fun with the game but that is not the case.

Tedious but doable given enough attempts. I'm just not willing to sink my free time into these kinds of encounters so I'd rather just go play something else instead.