Recent reviews by ⍟Tex

Digital crack cocaine 2024 edition.

I would really like to give this game a positive review, but in its current state I’m not comfortable recommending it.
Evil West is really fun, when it works, but it's riddled with so many bugs, often game breaking, and it doesn't look like the devs are doing any effort to fix those.

Some of the issues I encountered during a single playthrough of the co-op campaign along with my s.o. are the following:

Opening a chest sometimes results in getting stuck in place.

Once I had the crosshair reticle somehow move offset resulting in none of my shots connecting because I was shooting half a meter below the location my crosshair was pointing at.

Enemy falls off a cliff: softlock. (A good portion of the combat is melee centered, with the possibility of throwing enemies in the air and “cannonballing” them away, so it's fairly easy to accidentally throw one of them off an edge in open arenas).

Teammate gets stuck behind an object (train cart), resulting in a softlock (and when they disconnected I got kicked out of the session).

In some levels, opening the perk / upgrades menu first breaks the audio, then completely freezes the game and in one instance even crashed my whole computer with a black screen, I had to reboot.

Weird graphical glitches both on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. With AMD (mainly) the snowy terrain moves (up and down when the character gets closer or further). On Nvidia items glitch on screen, there are floating weapons, and often an endless rope coming out of the other player (lol).

In addition to all that, the usual Unreal Engine stutters are the cherry on top. At least I've been able to solve this issue when I switched to my Linux PC, which through the use of Vulkan somehow made the stutters go away.

Some of these issues were so prominent that at some point we were on the verge of dropping the game altogether. In the end we managed to push through the critical areas and ultimately complete the campaign. And I must say, the game, when it works, is tons of fun! It mixes some souls-lite and beat ‘em up elements in a dark western setting, with vampires and werewolves to slain. Combats are challenging enough at normal difficulty and somehow gave me some kind of primordial joy when we finally managed to get past any new boss.

The game also looks good and plays smoothly, with a pretty nice soundtrack which really fits the setting and really goes well along the game.

The story is not important at all, but still kinda enjoyable, and the enemy design is really well put together.

I'm so sad this is such a missed opportunity for an insanely fun game, which got crippled by so many technical issues. It wouldn't have been GOTY material for sure, but still a very solid and fun shooter. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it in its current state, so feel free to try it at your own risk, and be ready to put up with a lot of inconvenience if you do.

I had this game in my radar since I heard good things about it from Mutahar, about two years ago. Since then a couple of friends recommended it to me. I finally decided to play it and I'm really glad I did.

The first thing that I noticed about this game is the presentation, it feels really premium both in terms of graphics and cinematics. Ghostwire Tokyo managed to immerse me in its world like few other games could. The story is simple, Akito has a bike accident and gets possessed by a spirit, KK, and together they fight to cleanse Shibuya from a fog which turns everyone into spirits and save Akito’s sister who has been kidnapped.
I don't want to spoil anything but the story will explore much of the traditional Japanese lore about death, demons, spirits and other such creatures. There are some awesome set pieces and in general it really got me on my toes. At the end it gets a bit emotional and I also really appreciated the ending.

The gameplay is a classic action adventure open world where we will follow a main storyline, but we'll also have tons of stuff to do, from secondary missions to collectibles of any kind. I appreciated a lot of the secondary missions, some of them are really interesting. There's one in particular which takes place in a school and it was really scary, it actually gave me goosebumps. It also reminded me of Silent Hill.

The map is pretty big and we'll be able to unlock chunks of it by cleansing the gates which generate the fog.
The world is filled with details, and it’s very explorable, both horizontally and vertically. We can indeed climb all buildings, and glide from roof to roof in order to further explore and collect all the items.

KK will give us powers, so we pretty much have gun fingers and shoot out energy. The animations are pretty cool, and although at first they are a bit slow, by leveling up we'll be able to upgrade our moves and make them faster and more lethal.

This game is also VERY Japanese, almost as Japanese as the Yakuza series. For someone like me who is really fascinated by that culture I find it fantastic, since it's filled to the brim with typical Japanese stuff, from the foods and drinks, to a lot of traditional objects, cats, buildings, music, and the list goes on.

Speaking about music, the soundtrack is great, with pumping music when the action kicks in and very epic pieces overall. I'm not an expert and it's always hard for me to talk about music, but all I can say is that it really fits and once again it has some great Japanese vibes.

In the technical compartment I had some really high highs and some really low lows. Let's start with the positives, the graphics are insanely good looking, and the world is a joy to look at. Having a pretty capable machine I tried cranking everything up, and for a while it seemed ok, but when I started unlocking big chunks of the open world the troubles began.
Basically the game ran smoothly with everything maxed and TSR upscaling at 1440p, but I eventually started experiencing freezes as if I was running out of VRAM. Checking my VRAM utilization I noticed it was capped at 12 GB even though I have 16 available. Eventually I tried lowering some settings and ended up using the optimized settings by Digital Foundry with some tweaks. In the end, despite the vram utilization was still hard capped at 12 GB, I managed to get a freeze-free experience which arguably looked even better than before, since disabling ray traced shadows allowed me to also disable TSR and play at native 1440p with 60 fps. All in all I'm pretty happy with the results, even though in that department the game could have benefitted from some more time in the oven.

I played about 20 hours and completed the main story and roughly half of the other open world activities and side quests. I'm really happy with the experience and I could have continued a bit more, but ultimately I like to move on from games. Despite the technical issues, this is an amazing game and I recommend picking it up, especially if you like anything Japan related!

I wanted to give this game a solid chance, thus I went in with an open mind, ignoring all the bad press and the meming. I felt Gollum had potential and so I thought for the first hour and a half.

Despite the performance being pretty bad on Steam Deck, I thought the game overall was quite enjoyable. Sure, the gameplay isn't innovative, being a mixture of platforming and light stealth. But it's decent, and I was eager to know how the story developed. I found the atmosphere especially fitting the Lord of the Rings lore and vibe.

Alas, this all came to a crashing halt halfway through chapter two, when I got soft locked by the well known “instant game over after reloading a checkpoint” bug. I later found out that this was a known issue since 2023 and it won't be fixed since the devs studio was closed. I spent an hour and a half both trying to find a workaround for this and also trying to beat the chapter starting from an earlier zone and not dying, but in vain. The fact that every time I failed I had to play again the previous 15 minutes section all over quickly drained me and it became really annoying really quickly.
I didn't even find someone willing to share their save games online, in order for me to skip the infamous section and move on.

In the end it was such a frustrating experience and I gave up. The game is unplayable in its current state and it won't ever be fixed, so you should avoid buying it for your sanity's sake. Unfortunately I must confirm that the bad press was totally deserved since this is a borderline scam.

Not recommended.

Although this game aged extremely poorly in many aspects, it still is a unique experience which deserves to be played at least once.

We will play as Lucius, a kid who is the son of the devil. Chapter by chapter we will be tasked by our father with killing people inside the house we live in.

First it will be staff members, a maid, the butcher, up until more “high profile” targets. The killings must be disguised as accidents, in order to avoid and deflect suspicions about us.

Every kill will increase our power and eventually we will unlock new abilities, like telekinesis, mind control and fireballs.

The game is really explicit and graphic in depicting the murders, showing exactly how every victim dies with plenty of details. The story is pretty well written too, conveying a nice black humor sort of noir mood.

This is greatly enhanced by the soundtrack, which gives great moody vibes and perfectly fits with every scenario.
I must say the atmosphere is overall on point and works very well.

The mix of action and kind of “point and click” gameplay is smart but doesn't always work, and I found it pretty difficult at times. Some actions required to progress are really unintuitive or need a lot of exploration and trial and error to figure out. The fact that some important objects arent highlighted at all and often blend with the background doesn't help one bit, thus at times I had to help myself with a guide.

Another low point of the game is the presentation, which I guess is the aspect that aged the most poorly. Still, the overall style is consistent, albeit not looking great even compared to other indie games from the same time period. Also sometimes the game is a bit janky, with some hotbox issues which require some extreme precision to work.

Overall though, it was a fun experience and I really enjoyed being the villain and decimating the unsuspecting victims. If you can get past some ugly-ish graphics I'm pretty confident in recommending this game!

I'm so glad a friend recommended this game to me. It already was on my radar, since I got it in some humble choice, but I hadn't touched it yet, and wouldn't have for the foreseeable future otherwise.

Well, it was an absolute blast!

It took a bit to get used to the rhythm style combat, but once I got in the zone it actually wasn't too hard. I played at normal difficulty, as I usually do, and I found that being balanced enough for a first playthrough, not too frustrating but also not too easy and therefore boring.

The combat system is great, being a Japanese style hack and slash with rhythm and timing requirements. It’s easy to pick up but hard to master if someone actually wants to learn all the combos / special attacks and get the highest scores at the hardest difficulties. The main story isn't very long, but the game has tons of replayability in the form of challenges, higher difficulty and so on, therefore it fits both for a casual playthrough and for more “grindy” players who want to perfect games.

The story is well written, with fun and original characters, and we'll get to know them and their backgrounds. Bosses are also well written and each section of the game will climax up until the boss fight.
All the boss encounters are different in mechanics and they all felt new and original.

The game has an iconic cartoonish style, with a futuristic cyberpunk theme. Everything is masterfully designed, from the levels and landscape, always different and often really epic, to the characters, who are very peculiar and detailed. Some of them actually blew me away, such as, for example, the “werewolf” boss, which at some point we will fight in a huge place full of money (most likely a reference to Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin).

Locations are varied and a lot of effort was put into designing detailed rich levels, full of environmental storytelling elements. Colors are vibrant and there are lots of moving elements which give the feeling of a living, breathing world.
Although that's gorgeous, sometimes I had a bit of a sensory overload caused by all the moving stuff (the world also “breathes” to the rhythm of the soundtrack). Nonetheless, the overall game presentation was really breathtaking.

Finally the soundtrack, containing a variety of songs both original and licensed, is masterfully crafted and integrated into the game. For me, it reached the absolute maximum during the section where we fight on the notes of “Invaders must die” by Prodigy, but I also loved the boss fight with “Wolfgang's 5th Symphony”, among others. In general the music pumped me a lot and I was keeping the rhythm all the time with my foot.

In conclusion, this game is an absolute gem, a must play for anyone! A true pity that after the success of the game Microsoft decided to close Tango Gameworks Studio. At least we still get brilliant Bethesda games though… Am I right?

Well, anyway… totally recommended and one of the best games I played in 2024!

This game is a (dune) buggy mess, and I have no clue why it's so highly rated, but in my opinion it's totally undeserved.

Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Slaps And Beans is a basic beat ‘em up inspired by various movies starring the two actors. The concept would be fine, except in practice the game is really boring and repetitive. Combat hardly offers anything new, except for some tougher enemies later on.
There are few combat moves and hardly any special attack, few interactive objects, and even those aren't always useful.

Movement feels kinda clunky and imprecise, a little too slippery.

Throughout the campaign the difficulty is fairly low, but there are some really frustrating difficulty spikes in a few encounters.

Also, I can't understand how in such a simple game there can be so many game breaking bugs, which caused soft locks and forced level restarts right at the end of a section. That's unacceptable.

The only positives I can point out are the soundtrack, full of bangers from the movies (I imagine most of the budget went into licensing), and the graphics, which are pretty enjoyable overall.

In conclusion, a game which had great potential but ended up wasting it all with mediocre gameplay and a horrible QA.
Not recommended.

An incredibly refreshing roguelite deck builder with so many possibilities. These days I like to move on from games, but I can see how this can be a killer application for a steam deck or smartphone.

One big plus about it on deck is that you can easily lock it at 30 fps and set the tdp to 3 watts (!) and it plays perfectly fine, giving the deck a battery life of almost 7 hours!

Totally addicting and a perfect time killer, with a great emphasis on strategy and choices (with a bit of rng too of course… it's still a card game after all). Recommended!

Every time I purchase a decent arcade-ish racing game I end up binging it for a few days until I burn out (no pun intended). That's exactly what happened with this one as well. Actually got it on sale before it gets removed from the store.

The game is very enjoyable, I would say it's Microsoft’s spin on the Gran Turismo genre. It's both arcade enough to be enjoyable with a controller while at the same time offering a realistic driving style, different for every car, and rewarding clean lines and races.

There are hundreds of cars to collect and upgrade, and many races to beat.

The game is online, but it works offline too, UNLIKE SOME OTHER OPEN WORLD RACING GAME BY ANOTHER COMPANY *COUGH* UBISOFT *COUGH* and that's good.

Graphics are really good, and the game is very well optimized. I played both on my high end PC and on Steam Deck and got great performance either way (though Deck needed a bit of tinkering to get the optimal settings for 60 fps).

I got the Ultimate Edition, thus I was very disappointed to find out that it includes all the DLC except for the Hot Wheels one, which isn't available anymore for purchase. That was actually quite a bummer even though in the end I can live without it.

Overall then a very enjoyable game, I recommend getting it before it gets delisted, if it goes on sale again.

"You have been disconnected from The Crew® 2 servers. Please contact customer support with the exact following error code for further troubleshooting"

JUST MAKE THIS GAME OFFLINE ALREADY, WE DON'T CARE ABOUT LEADERBOARDS, WE JUST WANT TO PLAY THE DAMN GAME!!!