Recent reviews by parall4x

For someone like me who's been invested in the Borderlands franchise from the start, this game has been satisfying in a few ways. The comedy shines at many moments and has the expected absurdities. I enjoyed the character development and their relationships and motivations. I thought each character experienced meaningful growth along the way, especially but not exclusively Anu.

I found the group cohesion scoring (the skateboard system) to be overly opaque: I couldn't really understand why the group was only rated around 67% by the end of the game. I find most of these systems in games of this genre to be a bit frustrating and inconsequential, and probably wouldn't choose to play many more of them if it weren't for the fact that this is a type of Borderlands game. I think this is more a consequence of me not being motivated by these systems as opposed to them being designed or implemented poorly.

Fairly early impression at just over 5 hours, but yeah, if you have a reasonable expectation of what Early Access means - and I don't think this game remotely tests that definition - this has been a really fun experience so far.

The controls on a HOTAS (Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X) are fairly intuitive, but I needed to tone down the sensitivity on the pitch and yaw and using button 6 to select things took some getting used to. Being able to make fine propulsion adjustments with the stick hat is a really nice touch. The built-in mappings for my specific flight stick was very impressive and much appreciated. While using the same button for multiple purposes isn't unprecedented in games with flight stick support, the game cleverly uses B5 through B8 to ensure the player can do all the critical in-flight tasks on a 12 button device.

In its current state, some things get a bit repetitive: the tendency for outlaws to show up in seemingly every area, most notably. It would be refreshing to have occasional areas where I can just explore and solve, but maybe that's not tonally what the designers are going for or randomness has affected my experience. It's a bit frustrating to have hostiles jump in while you're trying to solve a puzzle, but again, that's a fair - if inconvenient - design and narrative choice: virtually nothing about living and thriving in this fiction is a given or convenient. While Unknown Signals are somewhat frequent, they're optional... but completionists like myself might feel plagued by them unless you can learn to let them go sometimes.

The scarcity of advanced crafting materials in the early game has been catching my attention with respect to timing. At Level 4, I have three ship slots that are constantly visually alarming that they're under-level relative to my player level, but I don't have even a fraction of the materials needed to modify them with the crafting system despite consistently completing Unknown Signals, Distress Calls, and scouring every area I jump to for containers and other resources. Likewise, despite taking on many optional activities, Perks upgrades are very slow to progress, or so it feels. It just generally feels like the pacing of crafting is lagging my other progress.

Ultimately, I'm impressed with where the game is at and not particularly concerned about its future. I do hope 2023 plays out like the roadmap suggests.

This is a brilliant little game. It requires some initial graphics settings tuning since some GPU-intensive features are enabled by default even if your graphics card doesn't have native support for those features. Once you get it running smoothly, it's a pure delight. While some have - perhaps rightly - criticized the brevity of the story, I think it's worth considering that the story is very conducive to occasional replay and the Creator Mode can augment that, too. I think this is a game worth supporting now so we can hopefully see more like it from LEGO in the future.

I'd rather rate this a "Maybe," but Steam doesn't allow for that. I played this game partly for historical purposes - to understand the lineage leading to SWTOR and because KOTOR1 was so emphatically recommended, and the game is fine in that sense.

However, on its own, KOTOR2 is inferior to its predecessor, especially in the last quarter of the game because of the well documented issues with the game's development schedule. The game's general quality suffers relative to KOTOR1 in a variety of ways:

• Dialog trees become confusingly cyclical during a single interaction. Later interactions sometimes reset to pre-mission state, as if the scripters didn't anticipate you coming back.
  
• You don't have opportunity to fully develop influence with your various companions.
  
• Lots of camera/positioning bugs during dialogs.
  
• Late game balance gets messy, requiring me to exploit corners to bug enemies while I buffed up again. This became tedious and repetitive on the last planet. I wonder if this is indicated by the drop off of percentages in late-game Steam achievements.
  
• Mission ordering and parallelism got really messy on Nar Shadda. I ended up leaving a major mission incomplete regarding Goto and I have no idea what I could have done differently.
  
• The plot element that is your character's big unique attribute defeats the purpose of your character existing. The story became contradictory and the motivation of your companions was completely unconvincing.

There were some things I genuinely enjoyed throughout, though:

• Large scale environmental features(Citadel Station, Telos enclave, Jedi enclave exterior).
  
• I made much greater use of crafting compared to KOTOR1.
  
• Mandalorian history and tie-ins felt like the events in KOTOR2 were part of a something that really mattered.

While KOTOR2 is an interesting study in TOR game history, I can't recommend it for general enjoyment if you intend to complete it. If you just play the first half, yeah, decent. I haven't tried any content restoration because I wanted to do the game the courtesy of experiencing it as it shipped. Despite having not yet played the restored content, I can somewhat confidently say that I made the wrong choice in playing the original format.

Whether you played the first Xbox/PC title or not, Psychonauts 2 is a charming sequel and continuation of the lineage of platformers that emerged from the Aughts while making many quality of life improvements over the first title. Each mind world is delightfully unique and makes entering every mind an experience rather than just a level to be cleared. Sure, for me, I want to collect _everything_ on the first pass, but it's actually quite nice to have to revisit each world to be reminded of the many art elements that turn it from a theme into an immersive environment with the trademark DoubleFine uniqueness. The story had me engaged throughout its entirety, providing resolution to some of the big questions spawned by the first game, and left me very satisfied at the close.

A fantastic modernization of a PlayStation classic. The visuals have utterly revived the game and given it new life in ways not possible in 1998, though the graphics defaulted to a much lower setting than necessary on my hardware: new players should augment those settings first, as some of the meshing was quite bad in the default.

The controls are very reasonable for keyboard and mouse, though the flight worlds will require a fair bit of compensation for mouse users. Steam has this game tagged in the store as Full Controller Support, but legacy DirectInput controllers like my SteelSeries 3GC - even with a driver - are completely unrecognized. This isn't at all serious given how well the game controls with keyboard and mouse, but a bit disappointing.

After playing the prologue and the first mission, I am amped to continue the story missions. This game is surprisingly faithful to the Star Wars flight sim lineage, with some modern touches for usability. I was impressed that the first thing you're presented with when launching is the accessibility menu: much respect to the developer for this, even if I don't need it.

Mouse piloting is a bit cumbersome and feels like it could still use some refinement. I'm very glad to already have a HOTAS flight stick to use with this game. The default flight stick mappings were near-perfect but I did have to fix the throttle mapping. The flight stick must be connected before launching the game. Otherwise, flight stick controls are very well implemented and not at all an afterthought.

I think anyone who has a place in their heart for X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or X-Wing Alliance will be very satisfied with this game from what I've experienced so far.

Obviously, having modern access to Halo CE on contemporary hardware is in and of itself a monumental thing given its historical significance. CE does have some quirks that aren't present in the original release/on console - weird things that are probably the result of modern hardware cycle times, like enemies spawning when they shouldn't.

Reach plays so well. It feels like a great shooter on PC. Whereas I was playing CE mostly out of obligation and for continuity, I'm so very much looking forward to continuing Reach because it has earned it.

This game quickly had me hooked - it had been two hours before I even looked at the time! It's entrancing, provocative, engaging, and challenging. I haven't played a shooter that I felt so compelled to advance in - for story and achievement. It touches on issues of morality and humanity while remaining a solid FPS without compromise - the shooting is very rewarding in this one!

An insane amount of replay and coop value. Just look at a few friends' "Hours Played" stats and you'll figure it out.