Recent reviews by Raq

I have so much to say about this game.

This writing is excellent, and it gets even better in Phantom Liberty. A beautiful story with well written, charismatic characters. The city feels alive, very well-designed and (often) beautiful to see. The gameplay and gunplay are fun, also thanks to the pumping soundtrack during fighting sequences, which is very good.

However, I do have to say that there was a lot of misleading/pumped-up marketing leading to the release of this game. It has been promoted as if it was going to be this extraordinary, game-changer RPG game, but the game didn't end up being any of that.

One of the things I found mostly jarring, is that the main story felt disappointingly short. When I saw the "point of no return" pop-up show, I had a funny facial expression because I really did not think I was nearly close to the end of the main story. I really feel like a lot of the game content should've been part of the main story. At least the Rogue, Panam and Judy arcs.

Even after 5 years from its release and multiple game patches, I experienced a lot of technical bugs, many of which really worsened the enjoyment and immersion of the game. One of them is Claire driving through the whole city and going crazy at the end of the first The Beast in Me mission when choosing to get back to the garage with Claire. I encountered other game and quest-breaking bugs like this.

Cyberpsychos appear on the game map at all times — this means V technically already knows where each one of them is located. This doesn't make much sense. If there were really 17 cyberpsychos in the city all at once free for days, I think the city would've already been burned to the ground. Would've been much better if Regina simply called her whenever she was close to a cyberpsycho. If V went away instead of defeating it, Regina would call V disappointed and angry since her research would be negatively impacted. The way the mission has been implemented in the game just feels faulty.

Characters are allowed to call you during missions, which can be very bothersome and can disrupt conversations, cause confusion and not being able to listen to mission conversations.

Interactions with Panam when the player is Female V can get very sappy, which feels very unfitting and weird since Panam is straight. I understand that there's a thin line between just looking at two big friends and two friends who look like they're into each other — but it clearly goes over it, and it feels like we're just living the exact same Panam you'd experience with Male V, except there's no kissing or sex scene.

UI is nice, but some of the beta concepts objectively looked better.

The game shows a "Skip" prompt on the bottom right when having conversations with characters. You can disable this from the main menu in the Interface section, and I've had it disabled since the first 10 minutes of the game, but it appears that the prompt still shows up in a couple of situations (I've seen it pop up when talking to Lizzy Wizzy for the first time).

The first hour of Phantom Liberty seemed incredibly unstable. Arriving at the Dogtown border - flatline. A few minutes into Dogtown — Flatline. Middle of fighting the Chimera - flatline. I've gotten more crashes in one single hour than I had in my entire playthrough.

I've played the game in Italian and the work that has been done on the localization is simply superb. Probably THE best localization work that has ever been done on a videogame, up there with The Last of Us games. I've listened to other voice over languages such as English, German, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese, and it really seems like CDPR invested a lot into localization in other languages, which is something awesome. Being able to experience the story, the characters, and being able to listen to all sorts of NPC conversations in my native language truly enhanced the immersion of the game for me. Everything has been localized meticulously, with attention to detail, and every small interaction feels natural.

The facial animations with JALI technology help the immersion and voice over even more, with naturally moving lips based on the dialogue audio. However, I have to say that, more often than not, facial animations would have this sudden switch to a different expression in 1 frame, with no interpolation, which feels very jarring.

Overall, I cannot say that I don't recommend this game. The technical bugs can be very frustrating, but other than that, there's a beautiful game. It's clear that a lot of love has been put into it. The story, the characters, how alive and living the city feels, a lot of things are very well-built in this game. It seems like most of its issues come from a rushed release, which is a big shame.

One word to describe this game would be "Lovely".

The artstyle is obviously the biggest "carrier" of the game, the hand-drawn Disney-esque feel of the game is really strong and it's truly beautiful. The story is well written and so are the characters. Voice acting is great (played in italian, which felt even more magical since the writer/director himself comes from my own country), and the music is beautiful.

Unfortunately I encountered a couple technical/visual bugs during the adventure, things such as broken enemy AI/non-responsive controls/dialogue audio cutting before the end. Some UI elements could also use some improvement, and some game design choices felt a little strange. However, I've only played the game before the first patch released, so all of these issues could have been fixed or improved.

Overall these didn't impact my experience much and I still deem it as an awesome product of the game industry that should really open the doors to more unique pieces of art like this.

good

Incredible experience. The chapter with Markus having to find the symbols to find Jericho could've been avoidable or shortened a lot. Other than that, nothing to say.

Where do I even start? Kena: Bridge of Spirits is definitely one of the best games I've ever played, honestly. The art direction, the music, the rots, the cutscenes, the combat, everything blends together in such a flawless way.

I'll admit, the story was a bit all over the place in my opinion, I couldn't understand a lot of what was going on. I think the narrative could definitely use some work. I also didn't really appreciate the fact that most of the chests you find in the game are solely for a currency that allows you to buy cosmetics (Rot hats and outfits for Kena). I think I would've liked some of Kena's outfits being found in some chests themselves, rather than having to complete Trials for them.

I played the game in Spirit Guide difficulty and I gotta say, it was already quite challenging, I cannot imagine myself ever trying any of the harder difficulties.

All in all, for being Ember Lab's first game, this was already a fabulous work of art. Can't wait to see what else they have in store for us!

The Quarry is not a bad game, but it's also hard to call it a good game. Overall I enjoyed it, the story is very good and has quite a lot of interesting plot twists, but I still wouldn't recommend it because of the following reasons:

First of all, this game is FILLED with technical issues.

- The 2K launcher completely ruins the experience of the game, causing lags and freezes every 2 minutes. Who's idea was it to make this useless launcher? And was it even tested?
- Characters sometimes go in bind pose for a split second upon clicking the interaction button
- Characters seem absolutely unbothered while being mauled by the werewolves. They barely scream or say anything.
- Facial animations are completely static in certain situations
- Animations in general are very stiff, like the ones where certain characters are being thrown around walls or the floor. Until Dawn did it much better
- I'm not sure if this is also a problem in other languages other than English, but the Italian dub of this game is incredibly broken. Dozen of dialogue lines are completely muted, and you can only see the subtitles. Also sometimes the dialogues keep going even after going to the pause menu

It feels like playing an early build of the game all the time, as if it was a beta or something. This game has not been tested properly.

Now, to another reason:

This game has...no ending. Yeah, you heard me right. As a lot of people already said too, once you finish the game you just get a summary of what happened to the characters after the events of the game. I even managed to make all the counselors (all the teens) survive but I didn't get any "reward" for it. No special cutscene where they see each other all together again. It was very disappointing.

The characters have very weird reactions to what's happening around them. They are supposed to be terrified because there are creatures in there and they don't even know what they are before very late in the game, but they seem to not be bothered that much and instead they spend 10 minutes arguing on who should hold a shotgun. Ok I guess?

Now, onto yet another reason:

This game has a "lives" system. When you make a wrong choice and a character dies, you can go back to a checkpoint and try to make the character live. You have 3 lives and you can re-attempt to save the life of 3 characters (or just the same character over and over, if you manage to kill the same one again and again). This feature completely destroys replayability. One of the reasons to replay these kind of games is also to see the different death scenes of the characters. With this feature now you can just make a character die to see the scene and revive them with these magic lives. Very meh design choice.


But anyway, again, as I said in the beginning, the story is quite interesting and has very interesting plot twists, and the music is also very good, from the main menu already, even. The characters are well written (except for Ryan. Ryan is the most irritating character in the game not because he has some nicely developed personality, but because he makes the exact same facial expression that you can see in this game's store page, as the first screenshot. He makes that face in every single frame of the game, when he speaks to anyone and it looks so passive aggressive. I hate it)

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME AT FULL PRICE. I mean, I usually say that for every game but for this game, I gotta really say it out loud. Some games are worth buying at full price, The Quarry ain't one of them.

Absolutely incredible game. The concept is so interesting and fantastically done. I remember seeing some of my friends playing it and I thought "meh, this must be the usual indie jumpscare-based cheap horror game" but boy was I DEAD WRONG!

I never thought I was going to find a horror game that I find scarier than Alien: Isolation. What makes this game special is the fact that every playthrough can be very different as there are so many different types of ghosts. One keeps turning the lights on/off, one keeps throwing objects around, one can hunt you from any sanity level, one can do all of these things at once. It's just unbelievable, the horror videogame genre just got to a whole new level with this game, in my opinion.

And the fact that this game is even still in Early Access makes me excited for all the new content that may come in the future.

If there's one thing that I have to point out though, it's the player models. They are very low quality compared to the ghost models and they kind of ruin the immersion a little bit when playing in multiplayer, but I'm sure they will be improved in the future.

Amazingly done, Kinetic Games!

Il primo, indimenticabile capitolo della saga. Nonostante ormai il gioco abbia i suoi anni, lo trovo tutt'oggi molto rigiocabile. Il sistema dei comandi non invecchia mai, trovo sempre piacere nel rigiocarlo.

Il miglior Tomb Raider mai uscito. Purtroppo questo gioco ha una pessima reputazione per via dei comandi frustranti, numerosi bug e glitch e per via dei vari tagli fatti alla trama. Tuttavia, con un po' di pazienza, se ci si abitua ai comandi, diventa un gioco estremamente divertente e interessante da giocare. La trama è sicuramente ilpunto più forte di questo gioco. E' la trama più interessante dell'intera saga di Tomb Raider, dato che tutti gli altri capitoli lasciano molto a desiderare come trama. Il gameplay si basa sui primi 5 capitoli della saga, i movimenti sono quelli, solo ovviamente con animazioni molto migliorate e molto più realistiche. Anche la soundtrack è assolutamente fantastica.

Se si applicano le innumerevoli mod uscite per questo gioco, è possibile avere un fix dei comandi, bug visivi, glitch, ed è possibile implementare delle feature presenti nella versione PS2 ma assenti nella versione PC. I modder di questo gioco hanno lavorato tantissimo per offrire la miglior esperienza di gioco possibile. Per scaricare le mod, andate qui: http://www.core-design.com/community_modding_tr6.html

Bellissimo videogioco horror! Bellissima atmosfera, i puzzle sono ottimi, tecnicamente per l'anno in cui è uscito è ottimo, storia intrigante. Consiglio assolutamente l'acquisto.