Senaste recensioner av Adanos

The Righteous:

• Good level design.
  
• Creative art direction with some truly curious boss designs.
  
• Balanced combat difficulty with minimal penalty for dying.
  
• Good number of secrets and some clever puzzles.
  
• Fitting soundtrack that is generally quite good.

The Profane:

• A couple of important progression items require very convoluted steps to find.
  
• Some encounters trigger during very specific windows of opportunity that can be missed. There are at least two situations where accepting or equipping an item is irreversible, which locks you out of completing certain objectives.
  
• Some objects have weird hit boxes. Ladders can be tricky to grab while jumping and to avoid grabbing during combat.

Final Judgement:

Blasphemous is worthy of its positive ratings. Like any successful Metroidvania its level progression is fun and complex, with plenty of secrets to uncover. Boss fights are simple but challenging, though not as punishing as Hollow Knight or Souls games, which I personally appreciate. Combat is pretty standard: mostly hack n' slash with some semi-useful prayer spells that I frequently forgot to use.

On the other hand there are disappointingly several ways that the designers lock you out of accessing certain content in a given run due to some very unclear or needlessly strict conditions.

Cute little 1-2 session mood booster that lets you explore, learn about animals, and do good deeds around town.

Great follow up to an already very good prequel. They've taken what worked in Innocence, made some gameplay improvements, and crafted another installment of solid storytelling.

Combat and stealth have been expanded a bit, making both approaches feel more consistently viable. You now have countermeasures to employ against hostiles when caught (no more being insta-killed) and a few new alchemical tricks to distract or incapacitate them.

The graphics are outstanding - some of the most beautiful scenery I have seen to date. They do well contrasting the dark, macabre zones with stunningly beautiful and vibrant ones.

One gripe I have is that autosaves still don't trigger often enough, sometimes leading to frustrating and repeated loss of progress if you have to reload. Opening a chest should just trigger an autosave!

Definitely one of the best stealth games I've encountered. It plays like how I wanted stealth to feel in the Elder Scrolls games, and the world-building and story-telling are just as good. It also resembles Bioshock with its steampunk style and chaos system, which changes the ending based on the choices you make and your play style.

Combat elements seem alright, but I went for pure stealth and low chaos during my first playthrough. Will come back for a high-chaos run in the future.

The DLCs offer more quality content that expands upon the main story more than I would have expected.

For a good number of hours DRG is a fun and sometimes tense co-op with a decent variety of mission types and a cool atmosphere. I exclusively played as the Driller, but I have heard that all the classes are viable and have good kits.

Most of the gameplay is satisfying enough, but the platforming is not good. I couldn't say how many times my character failed to properly climb a ledge and/or slipped off due to wonky physics. Fall damage is also more punishing than it needs to be. For a game with so much traversal of complex terrain they sure didn't do much polishing.

The co-op aspects of DRG are generally pretty good in-level (there should be better HUD alerts when friends are downed etc) but having to rotate between doing your missions and those of your friends is annoying because overlap is rare.

On the other hand, playing solo past difficulty level 3 is unreasonably challenging and not viable for most players. If you're going to make it unreliable for players to be able to mutually progress in their missions in co-op then at least tune solo mode appropriately.

After reaching your first promotion and unlocking all the weapons for your class the gameplay becomes more of a grind, having experienced all the biomes and enemies and missions already. There are "overclocks" for your weapons, but what you get is RNG-based and I ended up with mostly mods for other classes. In a perfect world this would make you want to try out the other classes, but having to save up resources again to unlock another set of weapons wasn't something I wanted to do.

The cosmetics are a predictable and somewhat charming addition (and points for being able to buy them with in-game currency), but you have to buy the same stuff again if you want to use it on other classes, which is stupid and makes me less inclined to try playing them. Even some of the emotes are somehow class-specific.

It's hard for me to say whether I can truly recommend this game. On second thought, the 60+ hours played probably answers that question, but because of the eventual staleness and QoL issues I can't really give it a strong endorsement. Hopefully they'll make improvements over time.

Hades is the first "roguelite" I've attempted so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I was surprised and impressed by how many hours it kept me engaged with relatively lean core content.

Completing my first run took about 20 attempts, which clocked in at around 15 hours. After this point progression comes from a combination of RNG and repetition, but continues being supported by great writing and voice acting. There's a good amount of story and unique dialogue to unlock, and amenities to purchase at home for those who enjoy that sort of thing. The fast-paced gameplay continued being fun for quite a while longer, with many weapon and boon combinations to experiment with.

Around the 45 hour mark is where I think the player should be tying up loose ends and reaching the conclusion of the game, but progression slows down to a trickle. The side quests and epilogue require you to have over a dozen interactions per character with each run yielding just one precious piece of conversation each (if they're even present). The game is also not very clear about the importance of increasing closeness and I squandered many opportunities to progress early on by either choosing to hold on to my nectar or exchange it for other resources that seemed more important at the time.

Hades impresses with its beautiful art, witty dialogue, great voice talent, and fun fast-paced action. It requires too much time and repetition to access the full story and easily becomes a completionist trap, but otherwise I strongly recommend giving it a try.

Prey is an immersive sci-fi FPS with similarities to Bioshock and Control. It's story-heavy with a vast network of characters (mostly deceased) who's agendas and interconnections are revealed as you gather intel and put the pieces together. Progression is mostly linear with a few karma-based choices yielding slightly divergent endings.

Gameplay mainly takes place inside a space station, but also takes you out from its relative comfort and into the very uncomfortably disorienting experience of navigating between airlocks. Enemies remain threatening until pretty late in the game and are creepy enough to want to generally avoid. This isn't really a horror game, but it definitely has its moments.

The game uses a somewhat unconventional crafting system where just about every object can be "disassembled" into its elementary components, which are then used to fabricate weapons and upgrades. There are a lot of "junk" items that can thankfully be converted into something immediately useful as well.

Much of the weapon kit is familiar with heavy resemblance to that of Half-Life 2. The exceptions are a surprisingly reliable stun gun and the GLOO cannon, which functions as both tool and weapon.

Neuromods (See: Bioshock's plasmids) add a great deal to the combat experience giving the character superhuman stat and movement bonuses and unlocking powerful elemental and paranormal abilities.

Great game with little to complain about. Hope to see a sequel in the future.

Control is a well crafted Sci-Fi action/thriller with an immersive, meta-infused narrative style and telekinetic combat that makes you feel like a walking calamity. Much of the story is told through scattered writings, recordings, and videos that can be dense at times, but they deftly create an eerie X-Files-esque world with plenty of mystery. The visuals are excellent, with great shading that gives the game's many dark areas added depth.

Jesse's telekinetic powers are fun and always useful, and they compliment the sidearm so effectively that you're able to push the offensive almost indefinitely. The decision to use recharge delay rather than ammo depletion was a good call that doesn't trivialize combat at all.

The game allows you to manipulate and weaponize the environment to a degree that I have not seen done before. Chunks of stone can be torn from any surface and large objects can sometimes be broken into smaller ones still usable as projectiles. The amount of detail is often incredible, with post-battle rooms looking like the aftermath of a tornado.

All this sustained power comes at the cost of having a very small hp pool, and even after maxing the hp upgrade tree late in the game I personally think Jesse feels a bit too fragile. I was impressed however by the robust set of difficulty tweaks offered in the settings that allow you to boost health or damage values to your preference.

Recommended strongly to Sci-Fi fans who enjoy games like Half-Life 2 and Prey, and those who enjoy Remedy's narrative style.

A short and relaxing little adventure that's certain to lift your spirits. Serves well as as a cozy stress-free interlude between longer, more demanding titles.

Shadow of Mordor starts out strong with its "nemesis system" that lets you infiltrate and disrupt the ranks of Sauron's army in a variety of ways. Combat is smooth and fast paced with satisfyingly lethal abilities and finishers to employ. Gameplay continues to feel fresh and exciting as you tier up to take on bigger groups of enemies and work your way up the ranks, culminating in some epic war chief encounters. This is where things unfortunately start to plateau.

The second region offers very little that you haven't already experienced. You will max out your skill tree just as combat begins to get stale. The appeal of taking on hordes of enemies wanes as captains become increasingly immune to multiple forms of attack, forcing you into tediously drawn-out encounters. The numerous rescue missions involve killing orcs under prescribed bonus conditions to release slaves, who then tell you to rescue more slaves by killing more orcs. Meanwhile, finishing the quest lines for each of your weapons rewards you with lore but disappointingly no new combat abilities. The additions of branding and mounted combat don't diversify things enough to justify wanting to subjugate another entire region.

At this point the story needs to start carrying more weight but the premise shines brighter than the story itself. The dynamic between Talion and Celebrimbor is interesting, but the plot is a straight-forward quest for revenge with a few one-dimensional side characters and surprisingly unmemorable boss encounters. Collectible artifacts offer some interesting tidbits of lore while collecting ithildin bewilderingly leads to nothing lore-related at all.

Then there's the Bright Lord DLC where you are in possession of The One Ring and eager to unleash its power in a well earned and cathartic final act. But it turns out pre-wraith Celebrimbor is quite weak with less hp, no ranged focus, and none of the improved combat perks that you enjoyed as Talion. Using the ring gives you a few precious seconds to even the playing field, but filling the meter again is a dull chore. War chiefs and their guard captains are oppressively resilient while side missions send you scrambling to hold back multiple fronts of orcs that somehow manage to quickly destroy your stone towers with swords and spears.

Shadow of Mordor relies too heavily on its combat to carry it as far as it tries to go. If they had invested more into the story and characters and consolidated progression into one of the two regions I think it would have been better. Despite the hours I put in to get as much out of the experience as I could there are too few positive elements spanning only half of the duration for me to be able to really recommend this game.