Recent reviews by Egg Shaped Fred

Buy it. Amazing experience for at least 50-75hrs.
Reviewed for the badge.

I bought this game in good faith that this was going to be a new Forza Motorsport, built from the "ground up", like the devs said it was. Boy, was I wrong. Maybe it was from the ground-up, but they left most of the "improvements" in FM7 or on the cutting-room floor.

I watched most of the pre-release [marketing] videos about the product - Incredible car detail, improved physics, new career mode etc. I'm not a car racing game expert - I don't play serious sims like Assetto Corsa or iRacing - however I have played quite a few others like Project Cars 2, prior Forza's and the GTs.
All of those games look far superior. All of those games have better physics that this. Even Project Cars 3 (which was an arcade game) has better wheel physics than this out of the box. On that, I had to spend hours configuring the wheel to even get something remotely playable. Default settings are not it. (This vid helped a lot to at least make it feel a little more like a car - https://youtu.be/D-vGQZ2_1fs?si=fIM7lt27I9aSp2X0).

As far as I'm concerned, what the devs promised for Day 1 of this release and what we got are not comparable. At all. Not even close. I would call it "false advertising" but frankly, like many other AAA games, I really feel it's actually approaching borderline criminal. Considering Steam likely won't give me a refund without me having to complain to my own consumer affairs Government departments would put my Steam account in jeopardy too. So I'm likely stuck with this rubbish. Considering the cost of the game, to me it's also a blatant cash grab.

Btw, I haven't played it yet but the first patch hasn't fixed much and a lot of people have worse performance now (it wasn't really great to begin with).

Issues:

Physics.
Look of cars (some look like they came from Forza 10yrs ago).
Tracks/Terrain can look bad in parts.
General performance. Random stutters.
Career mode of just road cars and it's quite short. The career mode was not built from the "Ground Up". It was slapped together in about 10 minutes.
Car ex system is annoying. Every car you purchase or win starts a Level 1 with no possibilities for tuning. The driving model is already crap. This just makes it feel worse. Levelling a car to get it to a level where you can properly tune it takes quite a bit of time.

TL;DR: AVOID. Do. NOT. Buy. This is clearly a beta test for players. Come back in 6-12 months, or never.

Update: Still rubbish with a wheel. The game is meant for a gamepad. Performance is still sub-par and the Drivatars are erratic, psychotic and sometimes useless.

Update - 2/Jun/24 - Practically no improvements with a wheel. Performance is still lacking. Cars are all over the place. Driving with a controller seems to be a LOT better than with a wheel. So this game was released on PC so those of us on PC could play this with a controller, much like we're on some kind of Xbox. What a joke. If you were intending to play this on controller from the get-go, then maybe... maybe... you could stomach the buy. Buy on sale. If you want to use your fancy wheel and pedals, avoid.

Much better than release but it still needs some work. This game has a very promising future.
If you like 4x space strategy, then Distant Worlds (2) is practically the best game in the genre with its only competitor being its counterpart, Distant Worlds Universe.

(Written for a badge, but go buy this game. It's great.)

Yeah, it's good. Better than Kingmaker. (This is for a badge - thanks Steam).

If you have never played any of the Mass Effect games, I highly recommend the Legendary Edition. If you have played all three before, then this may not be a good deal, unless you've never purchased any of the (expensive, even when on sale) DLC.

Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through all three games again with one character.

What an amazing roguelike. Definitely recommend a Buy.

Would have been a great re-release of the 2007 classic. This game is single-player only though but I don't consider that to be a massive deal or issue.

The greatest issue with this game is the "1fps" problem where randomly, your framerate will drop to 1fps per second and this can last a few seconds up to a few minutes. As you can imagine, this problem makes the game entirely unplayable. One caveat seems to be that if you have an AMD processor and GFX card, you may not be affected by this bug.

The developer reckons they have fixed the issue with one patch that added nothing to correct the problem. They do not converse with the community at all and frankly, I suspect this release was just a cash-grab.

My advice? Stay the hell away from this game and if you really want to experience the magic that was Hellgate: London, go look on ebay or Amazon for a genuine copy with key and then visit HellgateAUS[www.hellgateaus.info] for more information on official patches and mods from there.

TLDR / Put simply - AVOID THIS ITERATION OF HELLGATE AT ALL COSTS.

Amazing replayability and good strategic depth. It can be a bit harsh sometimes and the learning curve is quite long and involved. 100 hours will not be enough to learn everything there is to know about this game. Paradox's DLC policy is ridiculous though and if not bought on-sale, you will end up spending a lot of money. My suggestion would be to review the DLC first before buying, and then, only buy on sale.

One of the better ARPGs on the market and improved with the expansion (raised level cap, more content, two new classes (necromancer and inquisitor), new devotion specs, and many new items etc). If you are a fan of Titan Quest, the Diablo series or Path of Exile, you should look at buying this game.

What might catch players of Diablo 3 unawares is that once you choose your classes in Grim Dawn (yes, two classes make up each character you create), they cannot be respecialised to a different class. You CAN however respec to a different build in a given class, however it will cost you bits (coin). For example, if you're playing a Necromancer/Occultist (combined they become a Cabalist) and instead you would prefer to play something that uses a sword/board combination (say the Soldier class), then you would have to create a new character and start the game from the beginning. A lot of classes really don't become fun (and powerful) until later in leveling as well so I think this is the only drawback to the game for a new player.

The game runs well on even older PCs (I'd recommend forcing DX9 mode however), and you will not experience any lag or disconnects as the game is completely offline.

I've put 200+ hours into Grim Dawn at the time of writing this review and I would recommend it to anyone looking to sink a lot of time into an ARPG that differs from the Diablo-series (let's not talk about the abomination that is Diablo 3) or Path of Exile (great ARPG, made by an outstanding developer, however suffers from lag, and online-only is a bit of a turn off in certain situations.

Recommended Buy, even when not on sale!

Edit - 27-11-19 - With the second expansion, and now recent addition of another rogue-lite dungeon, Grim Dawn continues to improve. Crate have proven themselves to be a developer that will continue to update the game as time goes on. As above, I would highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys a solid ARPG. Buy when not on sale to support Crate. Who knows? We may even see another expansion after Forgotten Gods.

Clearly and easily the best space-based 4x game released since Master of Orion 2. The ability to play with over one thousand star systems, and thousands of other objects including planets, asteroid belts and other items makes this game one of the biggest in offering in content. Each time you start a new game, it feels like there is a new set of stories in your galaxy to immerse yourself in.

For newbies, you can automate parts of the game to allow the AI to control that portion of the game. This makes jumping in a lot easier instead of being thrown head-first into the deep end. However, the Matrix games forum has tons of information to get you up to speed to become a competant and then an advance player relatively easily.

The modding community also provides many fixes and improvements with the enhanced AI mod, extended universe mod, Star Trek mods (Picard era and "Return of Khan" TOS-era mods) and unleashed extended mod providing some of the best mods the community has come up with thus far (note that I have missed quite a number of mods here; this is just a sample!). The mod forum is available here (http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tt.asp?forumid=795) and also on the workshop.

The only weak points are its graphics, however they are extremely functional to the game design and the diplomacy which is mostly bare-bones. Although in DW's defence, most 4x games do not get the diplomacy right either.

I would recommend this game to any space-4x strategy game fan. You might also want to look up DasTactic and Larry Monte on youtube for some great "Let's Plays" on getting started.