Recent reviews by pyide_maybe

How to destroy a beloved franchise

• Ignore any and all feedback from players during the early playtests.
  
• Try to appeal mostly to fortnite fans, not skateboarding and skate game fans.
  
• Launch in Early Access and do Season Passes and microtransactions before the gameplay and world map are close to being finished, or even in just a decent spot.
  
• Have every Early Access dev update and patch focus entirely on monetization, currencies, and cosmetics rather than the core gameplay that actually matters.
  
• Build the worst and most boring skatepark city of a map in the history of the franchise over years of dev time, without the traditional variety and modes of the previous games that might make this blandest location possible even somewhat fun or grounded. When everything is over the top or designed explicitly for skating like any random skatepark, then nothing is unique or interesting.
  
• Launch with the only small district that's borderline normal unfinished, and then never finish it (Brickswitch).
  
• Mention no paywall to any gameplay content and maps up front as being a hard stance, then drop news of a slightly reworked tutorial map having a real money paywall and then later fake currency paywall.

Every player could probably list a bunch of other things they personally care more about that they are still super bummed about, like the lacking online features and functionality, community parks, vert and transition and lip tricks and pumping and momentum still sucking, missing tricks, wonky physics and aids and lacking hardcore options, missing game modes. Even the visuals, character designs, lacking skate culture, brands and clothing, wear and tear, and whatever other nonsense that doesn't phase me much at all. Their opinions are still valid, though.

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Nothing in games is ever perfect, but Full Circle and EA have seemed to have completely missed the boat with this one and decided to speed run its demise after shoving out an unfinished game while also taking the monetization approach of a finished game, every decision they've made since putting it out there has been worse than the last. EA has more than enough funds to not be as scummy as they have been here, especially when it comes to something as dead simple as keeping their word on no map paywalls. They should have just taken the common sense approach and remastered the original games for all modern platforms with some upgrades and improvements (like being able to get off board and move and drop objects in the original skate.) as a classic collection, and then make a new skate game (or not) based on the how well that was received.

Although I suppose if they had done that, the old fans and new fans would be even more disappointed with this new game if it turned out more or less the same as it currently has. Congratulations, and rest in piss to the skate franchise. You did not deserve this, but it's all EA knows at this point.

Thank you for the experience! Was weird and fun, great style and vibes and incredible soundtrack and audio design. Extremely impressive for a solo dev with some assistance. If not completely burned out, you should consider doing a developer's commentary mode like Valve does with their SP games.

I never fully grasped the trick controls in the time it took to play through once because of being so used to other skateboarding games and their specific control schemes, but I still enjoyed it a lot and could do most stuff when I wanted to.

Really enjoyed the sense of speed and momentum that just pushing and rolling and cruising and carving has, too. It's something that I've found to be extremely lacking in all other modern skateboarding games, even the ones claiming to be realistic sims. A few of them seem to focus more on the flip tricks and grind mechanics than the actual wheels to the ground locomotion, so they fail to capture the basic feeling of being on a skateboard. The skateboarding in Skate Story is pretty far from realistic and has plenty of physics wonk, but still manages to do a better job with some of the basics. Loved it.

Decent rally game marred by Unreal Engine's technical limitations and rendering issues.

You can read all about the various modes and cars and stages and actual driving elsewhere, so I'll just say it's good. Tarmac is better than DR2.0, force feedback improved, etc.

I personally cannot recommend the game because of the all of the technical issues and visual glitches, especially if you're a cockpit only driver. Cockpit racing has never looked worse in any game before, and also has never been so distracting and immersion breaking much of the time. I still can't believe how little has been fixed after the game has been out a whole year with all the patches, and also the most recent 2024 update did next to nothing here.

Cockpit drivers have to put up with:

- Broken interior reflections that cannot be disabled. Even when they look correct and aren't reflecting the dashboard instruments and other interior elements that would be physically impossible like you see in many cars and lighting setups in this game, they're generally too opaque and totally unrealistic, and blocky if using a lower setting for better performance. On lowest reflection quality settings they can also show the hood livery colors and crawl / move / smear all over as you drive. They need to remove these reflections entirely, or let people toggle them off completely. Far too distracting and totally unrealistic.

- Overexposed exteriors in bright daytime settings. Switch to the exterior views and you can actually see the roads just fine, go inside the cockpit and everything is blown out unrealistically. This largely seems due to UE4's default eye adaptation / auto-exposure feature. They did not properly adjust / disable this for the cars (except possibly the custom builder cars where this feature seems unintentionally non-functional with how these separate parts are cobbled together to make a car?), so going inside a normal "darkened" car interior makes the outside much brighter, despite all the windows and light that should be let in. Your fake video game eyes/camera adjust to this tiny car interior that's only slightly darker, making the outside totally blown out and overexposed. Another highly distracting and unrealistic rendering behavior, and indicative of a developer's first time using Unreal and not knowing the basics.

- Flickering shadows through the roof / car / sunstrip. This varies a lot based on the time of day and the angle of the sun/skylight, but it can be intense, seizure inducing bad. Higher or lower shadow quality settings can help with this, or can make it worse. No consistency.

- Horrible weather effects. Both snow and rain still look completely unnatural. The falling effects and the drop/splash effects on the windshield from cockpit view. Snow on the windshield is still totally broken, making the wipers totally unnecessary even in heavy snowfall conditions. The nine year old Dirt Rally has far more believable and immersive weather effects.

- Visual noise and artifacts on the road surfaces in motion. These aberrations are more pronounced at night with headlights active, and are visible in any view, but it's definitely worse through the windshield in cockpit view for some reason. Aside from running at a much higher resolution which is challenging due to UE4's awful hardware utilization, the only thing that seems to help is DLSS, but that also brings its own bag of issues with blurring, and ghosting / swimming surfaces in motion. There's always some trade-offs, and no sharpening option for DLSS in game, just FSR. There's also a small and odd void of sorts where the front of the car meets the road where the rendering really is wild in motion, like the engine just doesn't know what to display in this small area.

- Roadside objects, leaves, branches, bushes, foliage, etc clip through the car and are visible inside the cockpit if you get near them. Absolutely ridiculous.

- There is also a fake static "rainbowing" effect on the glass in cockpit view if shader quality is set higher than medium. Minor mention but still distracting, however this one is easily removed by turning down that setting, other issues don't have such simple bypasses.

I've never played a racing game or sim where I've been bombarded by so many immersion breaking flaws from inside the car until EA WRC, and definitely not any that couldn't be improved with some tweaking. You are stuck with a lot of these issues.

There's also not enough camera adjustment options in all the views. Dashboard, head cam, hood cam, whatever. Your "seat" adjustments in cockpit are also very limited (and extremely restricted in some cars), but all views should have similar adjustments like that for comfort and naturalness: left/right/up/down/forward/back/tilt - dashboard, hood cam, whatever. There's also very minimal motion driving inside the cockpit, you have some forward / backward movement when braking and accelerating using the head cam, but that's it. The "camera shake" option seems to only effect how much shaking happens during crashes. The view is largely rigid the rest of the time, giving the cars a very low sense of speed when going fast and also zero reaction to lateral g's on the driver.


If you can deal with a lot of these annoying issues and lacking features, you may still like cockpit driving in this game. They aren't always bad all the time, but when they stack up as can happen they become increasingly difficult to tune out or ignore. I've switched to the bonnet / hood camera which is not at all how I like to drive, but it's the simplest way to avoid a lot of the immersion breaking aspects you see inside the car, just avoiding the broken reflection is a major boon. Sense of speed is better as well.

Beyond those cockpit gripes, the engine just has terrible performance and does not take full advantage of modern hardware. And never will, since UE4 is essentially dead and won't be updated with things like proper multithreaded rendering and parallelization. There's only so much the devs can do to optimize on their end, and users throwing faster hardware at the game will only see minor brute force gains. It's a drag. Definitely see why Kunos ditched Unreal after ACC for Assetto Corsa EVO. Performance, clarity, triple screen, VR - UE4 is terrible at providing all of this.

Then there's stutters and hiccups in action, which can ruin a stage in a split second. Shader compilation stutters from DX12 have been improved in updates, but traversal stutters where the next chunk of stages and assets load in on the fly are as bad as they were on day 1. There's no getting around those. Night driving / headlights is poorly implemented, and there's no shadows cast from the front mounted lights, performance drops off a cliff in village sections of stages as well. Similar to weather, night driving looks worse and less realistic than the 9 year old Dirt Rally.

There's also still large frame drops and hiccups around the last sector of most stages, and when starting or restarting a stage sometimes your performance suffers until you alt+enter or open and close the basic graphic settings menu. Very odd stuff. Beyond all that, the general performance simply does not match the poor quality of the visuals being rendered in motion. You can fiddle with settings inside the game and outside in the ini files, but there's no ideal setup, concessions have to be made, flaws and issues have to be put up with.

It's still possible to have fun with the game, but when I was die hard cockpit only, every single time I played I would run into one or multiple issues that pushed me away. Can't say they'll do the same for you, I think most people into the game put up with a lot of it just fine, but anyone still on the fence should know what they're getting into, especially if they're a fan of immersive cockpit experiences. This game is still basically anti-immersion there after a whole year of post launch support.

I cannot believe MS junked the folks who created my GOTY for 2023.

Truly terrible move, devastating. RIP Tango, yall deserved better.

An internet connection is required to play Tony Hawk’s™ Pro Skater 1 + 2.

This should not be tiny, faint text hidden at the very bottom of the store page, absolutely insane requirement for a game like this.

Remove the online check, stop punishing paying customers, Activision. This is ridiculous behavior in the days of portable PC gaming ala Steam Deck. Steam itself is already DRM, why are you doubling it up and adding another unnecessary barrier of entry?

Edit: Refunded for now. Will consider purchasing again if the online requirement is removed.

Anti-Consumer DLC Practices. Capcom pls.

With the brand new release of Rashid, we now know you cannot buy a single character outright, you have to buy packs of in-game currency. And the pricing structure is such that you have to buy more coins than a character costs.

Rashid is going for 350 coins, the lowest amount you can be is 250 coins for $5, so you have to pay $10 for 500c or $12 for 610c and have leftovers.

Typical scummy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you would expect from a terrible mobile game. Capcom does not need to resort to such tactics to sell content for a game as popular as Street Fighter. All this does is make people like me on the fence want to avoid spending any additional money on anything to avoid supporting predatory and consumer unfriendly practices.

Capcom knows exactly what they're doing with these pricing structures and it's super friggen scummy of them.

Hopefully by the time they add characters I really want to buy in a few years, things have changed. I went from looking forward to future DLC characters, to it being something I would never want to pay for and support because of this trash.

So, thank you (and eff you) very much Capcom. Please turn this nonsense around ASAP and let us buy single DLC characters outright with actual money.

This is my happy place.

The game is fantastic and yes I have played for over 100 hours, but Elden Ring is still greatly marred by numerous technical issues preventing a full-on recommendation. ~15 hours of this was probably troubleshooting, tweaking, and testing, and the experience is still far from consistent when it comes to stuttering and performance. This was possibly the worst end user experience I may have ever had with any PC game on the technical side.

- PC optimization and utilization is absolutely awful, they need to farm the PC port out to someone else who can fix it up right, because FROM doesn't seem too interested in improving it themselves. Even the Steam Deck devs at Valve are making optimizations in Proton/Linux to reduce the stuttering that the Windows version will likely never have. It's crazy. The issues with DX12 and this EZWorkPool middleware they use create issues above and beyond any big PC release in the past decade. Scaleform as well, according to Kaldaien (creator of DSFix and SpecialK)[i.imgur.com]

- Forced Chromatic Aberration is truly terrible and incomprehensible. The eye strain and fatigue this distortion and blurring of a large portion of the image, which gets worse towards the edges is extremely rough. It also makes no sense for a dark fantasy game to have a defective camera lens effect applied, it outright ruins some of the gorgeous art design and atmosphere with the blur and orange/blue colored fringing around objects. This should 100% be optional, like every other game which uses it. A toggle for this would benefit everyone, even console players.

- Other features like high frame and refresh rate support would be nice, but at the very least, ultrawide support should be added. It took the creator of Flawless Widescreen days to fix the issues with this, including the low animation rate of distant enemies beyond the 16:9 space. Get QLOC to help out if you can't be bothered to do it yourself, FROM, their 21:9 support in Dark Souls Remastered was solid. Or do it yourself and provide the bare minimum, here! If an outside party can do it in days, someone inside could do it in hours.

No big complaints about the game itself, I love it, and if you don't mind playing completely offline and bypassing EAC, you can fix some of those gripes yourself, but the PC performance and stability itself is such a huge negative, that I couldn't possibly suggest someone else buying it on PC currently. It pains me to give this one a thumbs down, but I have to be truthful as that's where it stands currently. They've already sold a crazy amount on PC, so it's not like any of this junk truly matters, anyway.

FROM, please fix the game. Thanks!

It's a decent prototype but thin on content and gameplay, even for Early Access standards.

I love skateboarding games and reallly wanted to support this, but I cannot personally recommend anyone else buy this for $20 until the developers begin to speak openly on what they're working on next, and when to expect some content updates and gameplay improvements. When that happens I will be able to recommend it.

I know it's just the start, but we're all seemingly in the dark here with just vague mentions of their plans and a longer roadmap via the EA description, so all I can do is make assumptions. And my assumption is that Skater XL is at least least 3-5 major updates away from hitting the price point they launched this proof of concept with.

The foundation is solid enough but it has a loooooooooong way to go. Developer transparency and establishing a consistent and open dialogue with the community going forward will do a lot to help this succeed. I wish them the best!

Another fantastic game, Blendo!

Loved learning all the systems and how to operate and control everything to complete these little heists. Wish I had played it sooner! I was confused in the beginning when I saw there was a control key dedicated just for blinking, thought it was just a novelty - first FPS game to have manual eye blinking! But then... whoah :O

If I have any negative things to say it's that there's not more! For me it felt like it was just starting to ramp up once I got all the tools and understood the terminal commands and how to use them more effectively, and then it ended soon after. Still absolutely loved what was there, and it's definitely replayable if you're into speedrunning. Will have to check out the user created levels on the workshop sometime, too bad there's not gobs of them to go through!