Recent reviews by Angel

I have an RTX 2060, not even a Super. I bought it in December of 2019, right before many world-impacting events throughout 2020. From the get-go I understood that I had no place among the most efficient, most powerful GPUs. I expected to never enjoy anything that had the word "ray tracing" stuck to it.

That was the case until I played the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition. High frame-rates, beautiful graphics, completely overhauled entire regions of the game. By far one of the best (if not the best) applications of ray tracing to date. The devs actually reworked and overhauled the lighting in the entire game to make it entirely ray traced. Absolutely gorgeous.

A couple of years later Portal with RTX is released. Sure, I know, it's not fair to compare the two. It's not fair to compare a AAA 2020 title with a marketing stunt by Nvidia to sell you the most expensive graphics card ever.

It's not fair to compare a game developed with the goal of reaching as many people as possible with a playable ad that makes itself unable to render tiny closed rooms with ray traced lighting to sell you the newest coolest tech!

Sad!

Aside from a few crashes when trying to play with friends (joining a lobby and loading into a game crashes someone in the party at random, and it's almost a certainty), this game is the definition of SMOOTH. SMOOTH performance, gameplay, graphics, etc. It's all incredibly slick and smooth and polished (aside from the BETA jank of models sometimes not holding guns properly).

Great stuff, can't wait to try out Warzone and DMZ.

Although I'm having fun and the game is definitely much better now than at start, I cannot recommend this. Not because it's a 0/10, but because it's a 4.9/10. Not good enough to be even average.

First things first, the launch has already passed. We are no longer there, and the team has seemingly been working very hard to get this game to a better state. It wasn't, however, just bugs needing fixing. The game lacks content. It barely passes any bar for a fully launched title, to be truly fair.

Having pre-ordered the Gold Edition I really felt like I paid extra to be part of a QA team where ideas are thrown at me and I'm meant to see if they're any good. They tried to get a tech demo or concept build to pass as a fully released AAA flagship title. I can't imagine the levels of failure and incompetence needed to achieve this, to take such a huge franchise and so completely destroy it with such a poor release.

The grossest smoking gun, for me, is the general design and direction of the game on which they're now have to do a complete 180 because it failed so unimaginably hard. They stripped away vital HUD elements, made maps feel like pristine sets and stages, added wacky and funny personalities to the specialists who joke around and do the "Dreamworks face" at the camera, and gave them all special abilities like Overwatch. On top of all of that are empty maps that are few in number and even smaller in inspiration, as well as a couple of guns for each category of weapon. Actually mind-blowing.

When it comes to glitches, there are the usual suspects. Bullets not hitting when they should, visual artifacts and bugs, poor performance, etc. It is true, however, that these issues are much better now than they used to be.

Finally, I gotta say I'm having fun with the game. Been grinding the battlepass and all the guns for the last 50 hours and it's just for the dumb fun of it. I can't imagine I'll feel much motivation once I've unlocekd all the guns, which won't take much longer, only got a couple to go. I have to, however, have something to show for the money I spent on it.

Hopefully the gaming industry doesn't turn into the QA industry where every new full priced title is a new incomplete dev build founded on completely idiotic ideas and visions put together with no care in the world that end up being abandoned for the newest thing next year.

EDIT: I have, since writing this, uninstalled BF2042. I've unlocked nearly all guns, mastered all of them at least to tier 1, and I simply do not find it in me to play through Season 2. I might return for Season 3 to see waht they do with it.

This game is half-baked, buggy, most side quests are pretty unpolished, your immersion will be broken by characters glitching out, disappearing, popping back into existence, floating. You'll be killed by nothing, cars will go through you and become invisible. Police will teleport in front and behind you.

And yet I've spent the last 4 hours wiping tears after the ending, and it was the happiest I could've gotten. Just do it, play it, grind side quests, become a legend, do whatever you gotta do - just make sure to burn it all to the ground when given the option.

I finally finished the first (and only so far, and potentially still missing a second half?) Act, which to me means doing all the side quests, along with the main quests and also finding all of the treasures, stashes, and story bits. I actually haven't experienced EVERYTHING in terms of dialogue or character choices, but after 30 hours I think I got a good grasp of the game.

First things first, this is a ROUGH gem. If you don't mind poor performance, often slow and clunky combat, as well as immersion-breaking problems during cutscenes (like characters not being in frame, or missing animations, or missing audio, or a combination of both), then by all means go ahead and enjoy. If you're looking for a complete and seamless experience, STAY AWAY... For now.

I'm actually somewhat worried about the state of the later Acts on release, I wonder how much polish they'll have on day 1, and how many further updates we'll have to see to fix issues. This is not a question of quality or talent, but more-so of time and deadlines. What we have gotten so far is VERY good and clearly so much passion has gone into the project thus far, it's just not finished yet.

Ignoring clunkyness and jagged edges, the gameplay is very fun. The freedom of movement you have together with the very interesting (although not the largest) arsenal and spells makes combat very satisfying. It actually feels like D&D combat, where different weapons don't have wildly different stats, and rather change in playstyle, as well as a wide range of spells that more often than not rely on a coin flip to hit.

The story is engaging, a lot of twists and turns. I really did not know what to expect, and I'm not going to talk about details, more-so say that it feels very mature, and your companions feel grounded and deep. Side-quests and side-stories felt equally important and real, although clunkyness sometimes made them a bit difficult to get through or be totally immersed by.

Overall, this Early Access gets an 8/10 on a good day, 7/10 on a bad day due to glitches and lack of polish. With release and polish this game might get close to a high 9.

This will contain SOME story elements, but nothing you haven't seen in the trailers.

Have you ever watched "The Edge of Tomorrow"? It's a movie adaptation of a story in which the main character, after an encounter with an alien threat, becomes pretty much immortal. Every time he dies, he returns to some point in time before it all went down and, with the acquired knowledge of the last attempt, tries to move forward bit by bit.

The movie (which is really good btw, worth a watch) does an amazing job in portraying just how many loops the protagonist has been through as the story progresses. You don't actually sit there and watch hours and hours of loops, each one being slightly different. You see the most important bits, but everything else is portrayed in how this endless cycle of life and brutal death almost breaks him. It's almost as if he goes through the stages of grief, and in the end he's a different person. All of the dying, the killing, over and over again, it changes him.

This game is very similar, but instead of a death loop, it's simply a time loop. Whether you die or not, 12 minutes is all you get (or 10, depending on how the story goes). The issue, however, is that this totally shouldn't be a game. Having to sit through literally hours and hours of the same thing over and over again only to make some tiny bit of progress by pure chance which then prompts you to go through it all yet again is just not fun.

Not only that, but the protagonist literally sees his wife getting murdered multiple times. She gets kicked, punched, shot in the head while screaming. He gets killed himself multiple times. His behavior barely changes, he remains the same person and reacts the same way through the entire game until a really odd revelation breaks things.

I'm usually good at brainstorming SOME workaround to issues I find in games, specially when they are related to gameplay or mechanics. I just can't do that with this one. This is just not something you can fix in a game unless you want to take away the controller from the player and do a bunch of cutscenes.

You also end up having to write so much for the game to feel reactive to your choices, and often these studios just don't have the budget for thousands upon thousands of voice lines, specially when they hire the likes of Daisy Ridley or Willem Dafoe. I don't know, I guess I don't recommend this if you despise back tracking in games, going over the same place or event over and over again without much progress being made.

What a shame.

I don't think this is a bad game, specially in today's environment. Most "bad" games today are well made, but with ill-will attached as a free, unannounced, unwanted and obligatory DLC, including Expansions that get the publisher's hands ever so closer to your wallet.
This is clearly not the case with GreedFall. It's obvious to anyone with functioning thought processes that this game took a lot of work, time and blood to make. I just didn't enjoy it, and it's a purchase I sort of regret making but out of my own lack of research.

DO NOT go into this game expecting, like I did, fluid and flawless gameplay coupled with a brilliant thought-provoking story. It's very pretty, and has a very unique charm, but it does not hold its own weight when it comes to my own preferences. Some things I simply am too sensitive to. Let's get into the easy-to-read bullet points:

Pros:

• Graphics: Not the most advanced, but definitely pretty to look at. Surprised me in many ways, even though performance issues sometimes forced me to get into lower settings.
  
  
• Setting: Monsters and magic alongside colonial-era empires, not much more to be said.
  
  
• Labor of love: Clearly, this wasn't made out of Greed (get it?), it was made out of a desire to make good games, and it shows. You don't feel as if the developers were lazy, or that they were rushed to deliver a half-baked product. Most of their downfalls simply relate to possible lack of experience?

Cons:

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• Graphics: Character models really look off, sometimes too sharply detailed with rough edges, sometimes too soft. The eyes are what get me the most, though, they're always really dark. Nit-picking, but still.
  
  
• Animations: Most people mention the Lip-Syncing, but I don't exactly hate it. If anything, it adds a bit of a "rough diamond" charm. After playing games like Fallout and STALKER for so many years, it's definitely not as big of an issue. The actual body animations did catch my attention sometimes, however. Specially in combat.
  
  
• Writing: This one is complicated. It seems that, regardless of the Devs really putting in the effort to create a branching storyline with options, within those options you are pretty stuck. I specifically remember speaking to a character and being prompted three questions. The first was about his personal life, the second about his troubles (which I will not get into, to avoid Spoilers), and the third about the crimes he had allegedly been accused of. I, more curious about his alleged crimes, asked about them first. My character seemed strangely concerned for the man's safety, and believed every word he said. Confused, but still immersed, I moved on to ask about his personal life (the first question of the list), at which point my character suddenly turned hostile again. I then realized I had to follow the path of the questions linearly, because each lead to the other, rather than being independent like in The Witcher 3. It would've made more sense to just give me no options at all and had it all flow by itself (which isn't optimal, but still better). This does not stink of laziness, but rather of inexperience. It was disappointing, and only proved to repeat itself later on.

I've definitely not given this game much time, but for how much it cost in my currency, there are many other AAA, including some RPGs like TW3, that are much cheaper. If this was even cheaper than them, I would probably recommend it. But as it stands, it does not seem worth the price.

If you are, however, a fan of older RPGs from the early 2010s, late 2000s, this might be for you. Just not for me.

24 hours into my very first playthrough and just left the starting island. What?

This game is living proof that a rough start isn't concrete evidence of a game's future lifetime. I would consider it a fantastic blend of Battlefield's weighted realism and aesthetic with CS:GO's tactical gameplay. Really a great game to play with friends, somewhat fun by yourself.
But, really, play with friends. Or try to make friends with the cool people you meet in matches. Playing by yourself will force you to go through some often unpleasant or uncomfortable situations. Trust me.

Overall, 8.5/10. Great stuff, buy it.

PSA: Stay clear from the Starter edition. It's a cash grab, deserves to be a free trial rather than anything else.

Genuinely more fun than any other Battle Royale game. Not even joking. What the ♥♥♥♥?