Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον ⍟Tex

This is one of those games which will stick with me for a while. It slowly grew on me the more I kept going, and while playing it I felt totally immersed in its world.

Disco Elysium was on my backlog for a while, I had heard great things about it and so I finally picked it up and pushed through it. Well, actually “pushing through” is probably non the appropriate terminology since it took me a long time to complete and I don't have much spare time lately to split between my many hobbies. I should just say I savored it, piece by piece, and it actually tasted great!

I should say the incipit is a bit of a cliche, probably overused in too many games, but it works well here. The game starts with an amnesiac character (us) and we will have to backtrack and piece together what happened up until that point, before alcohol and drugs abuse caused us to trash our room and forget everything.

We will soon find out we are detectives, tasked to solve a murder case in Martinaise, one of the poorest and degraded areas of the city of Revachol, a former capital of the world now in decay.

Alongside us we will have the trustworthy lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, in my opinion one of the best characters ever conceived in videogames history. In fact, all characters in this game are extremely well written and really feel human more than NPCs. The fact the entirety of the dialogues are dubbed is an even more surprising fact, given how many lines of dialogue there are overall. Aside from other characters, we will often have thoughts, represented through internal dialogues with different parts of our psyche and personality. As I said before, the quality and depth of the writing is paramount and it really is the key factor which kept me immersed in the story.

The overall atmosphere is great too, the semi open world hub areas aren't really big, but they are densely packed with things and characters to interact with, and almost everything opens up new branches of the story, side quests which are often linked to the main one or simply just help getting a better grasp at the world we are into, both socially, politically and economically.

I was baffled at how the overall experience was tightly tied together, and how seemingly random things ended up connecting later on and forming such a cohesive world feeling. Every piece of the puzzle nicely fits together in the end.

The story is also great, it's a detective noir rich with plot twists, as it should be. Alongside it, we will be choosing which kind of cop we want to be, through ethical and moral choices we’re presented with.
I won't spoil anything, but nothing is what it seems and no stone deserves to be left unturned.

Talking about graphics, Disco Elysium has a very peculiar hand drawn style, which is timeless and will help appreciate the game even many years from now. There are lots and lots of fine details which convey a feeling of decay from the world aesthetics. Every character and even each personality trait has its own hand drawn portrait. I truly appreciated the effort in this regard.

The sound in this game is absolutely brilliant. As I said before, all the countless dialogues are completely dubbed, and trust me when I say there are lots and lots of lines. And the voice actors are really good too, “S” tier dare I say.
Aside from the stellar voice acting, the soundtrack is great as well. Every hub has a main theme, but music dynamically adapts to the events, in order to properly convey all the emotions and feelings of the moment.

Playing Disco Elysium is basically like reading a dynamic book. Writing is brilliant, and dialogues often go really deep into many different topics, ranging from more serious socio-economic and political subjects to lore, religion, science, and much more. This really succeeds at making the fictional world really believable and immersive.

The only real complaint I have towards this game is that some dialogue trees are really massive and it's not possible to save during these. Some dialogues can easily last the better part of an hour, thus the ability to save midway would have been really appreciated. It also would have made it easier to save scum dice rolls, but you can do that anyways, it's just more inconvenient.

All in all I'm really happy I finally completed Disco Elysium, I would recommend it to anyone who loves RPGs and great writing in general. I also found the english translation of the book this game was inspired from, and I will for sure give it a read eventually.

Great experience, recommended!

I can't recommend this game. It's dead and kept on life support. It lacks players and content. This could have been a great title, similar to the Warhammer Vermintide / Darktide franchise, but instead it's just a missed opportunity, in my opinion.

The campaign is short, we completed it in about 5 - 6 hours. After that, the only thing we could do was repeating it at higher difficulty, but neither one of my friends felt like grinding the same content over and over again.

I then tried a couple of times the matchmaking, but failed to find anyone except for a couple of guys who left the game after a few minutes, leaving me with the useless bots to die miserably.

And that was it. I then uninstalled the game and moved on.

Now don't get me wrong, as a fan of the Aliens franchise I totally loved the campaign and the fact it's directly tied to the Prometheus / Alien Covenant lore (both extremely underrated movies, in my opinion). I loved being able to visit the engineers ship, I loved the shooting and the sound effects of the marine rifle, just like in the movies. I had some good fun. And that's another reason I was even more let down when I couldn't get more.

The maps are big but most of the space isn't even utilized, at least I wish this game was moddable, users would create tons of content. But I guess the tools aren't really available, so even the mods are really minimal. I would have liked to revisit the campaign with a 1st person perspective, but even that isn't possible at the moment.

The only way I can recommend this is when heavily discounted and only if you can convince a couple of friends to play it together. Otherwise it absolutely isn't worth it.

I came for the gems, I stayed for the soundtrack!

Memory is important, really important. But what if memory is deceived by nostalgia?

Well, I guess this game is one such example. In fact, I remember playing it at my friend's house, some 20 years ago, when I was still a child. I have such fond memories of those afternoons, split between the likes of Rayman, crash bandicoot, and of course, Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow. I remember wanting this game, being jealous because I couldn't play it also when I was back at my house.

Well, what I was missing at the time, and I actually realized now, 20 years later, is that not having this game was actually probably a blessing in disguise.
Yes, this game is bad. For starters, it's really, REALLY hard. And not in a good way. The challenge, for me at least, came from its inconsistency. Everything is inconsistent, platform edges, hitboxes, movement… The game doesn't even do a good effort explaining its mechanics (I guess I should have read the manual, duh… but still, other games of the time, like Rayman and Crash Bandicoot, had no issue explaining the few mechanics when they gradually got introduced to the gameplay).

So yeah, as a kid I didn't really realize how evil this game is. I just loved the fact that it was a Donald Duck game. The art is fine even though the animations, once again, are a bit stiff and inconsistent.

One actually great thing about this game is the soundtrack. I loved it and I still listen to it from time to time. But unfortunately, even that didn't work properly out of the box in this version, and it needed some tinkering to fix, at least on Steam Deck.

Finally, after getting the game to work properly, I played for about an hour, just enough to barely beat the first level boss and getting introduced to the transformation and grappling hook mechanic of the second level. By that point I was so fed up of continuously falling and dying due to inconsistent hitboxes that I gave up and uninstalled this mess.

Some might consider this “challenging”, and it definitely is, to a degree. However I don't find it a particularly entertaining challenge, rather a mostly frustrating one. Therefore I don't recommend picking up this game, maybe just watch a Speedrun (the game any% can be completed in under 20 minutes). Instead I strongly suggest anyone to check out the beautiful soundtrack, which is really a piece of art in my opinion.

Journey was a pretty little experience I enjoyed playing.

Visuals are very simple and yet very suggestive. A lot of care went into designing the creatures you meet along the journey.

Sound is also really good, with a soundtrack capable of masterfully conveying feelings and emotions.

I’m probably a bit slow, but I had some trouble following the lore of the game, which is completely visual, represented by drawings scattered around. I was able to grasp that we were visiting a decadent world of a formerly great civilization, but when it got to details of the story, I had to read those elsewhere to get a more clear picture. It's not a complicated story anyway, probably a metaphor of humankind, but also a representation of the cycle of life.

I liked the fact that while playing you can meet other players online. At first I thought they were bots but after a while I understood they were actual players. That's a nice touch which gives a more human and lively touch to the world, and a surprise I didn't expect.

The game is pretty short, I managed to finish it in a couple of hours. I'd recommend getting it while on sale, it's definitely worth it.

This game Is so frustrating, unrewarding, and ultimately boring, that I uninstalled it after about 12 hours because I felt like I was wasting my time.

The gameplay loop is something like this:
- exit garage
- win some money racing
- try to get back to the garage without getting busted by cops
- repeat until you can finally afford the next small insignificant upgrade which will barely increase your car performance

Races are pretty hard because even if you're faster, AI will always catch up.
One mistake and the race is lost. Oh and of course, limited restarts! Because why not make it even more punishing.
And then there's the cop chase part. If you get busted, or total your car, you lose all the money you won in the last session. At low heat level it's possible to outrun cops, but after about heat 4 it gets pretty hard, and even if you manage to escape you will get spotted again before reaching the hideout.
Nothing feels less rewarding than playing for 30 minutes, barely winning some spare change after tryharding a couple of races, and then proceeding to lose it all because of the cops.

Performance is bad on Steam Deck, but it was still playable at the lowest settings, although with some pretty ugly visuals.

Oh and of course, adding insult to injury, connecting to the abysmal EA app is required even for offline mode. At least it didn't constantly crash like it did for NFS 2015.

This game has a few positives, for example I liked the new cartoon-ish driving effects and the cel shaded characters. They give the game some Auto Modellista vibes, differentiating it from the other chapters.

The music is nice too and the story isn't as cringey as in NFS 2015.

All in all though, those aspects weren't enough to counterbalance the extremely slow, boring, repetitive and unrewarding gameplay loop, at least in my opinion.
NFS Heat wasn't anything amazing, but still leagues above Unbound, so if I had to choose I'd recommend that instead. Sadly, another missed opportunity for a franchise which is blatantly ignoring the requests of its fans and instead going its own way.
Not recommended.

This game is rough.
In the past I tried it out a couple of times, but as usual I dropped it after a few hours, unable to actually understand / focus on what I was doing and ultimately immerse myself in the game's ecosystem. And I need to reiterate that this game is rough. It will fist you, repeatedly. It will force you to abuse those F6 and F7 buttons until they'll be worn out.

This time though I was determined, so I prepared myself with a bit of lore beforehand, and also a quick research on how to modernize the game a bit with mods. I actually used the “starter pack” mod and a couple of high resolution texture packs, in order to keep the gameplay as vanilla as possible but at the same time avoid some headaches.
And so, after some quick prepping I dove in head first and I pretty much straight up completed the game's main story and some side quests. And I loved it.

Don't get me wrong, the game is extremely janky, it didn't age very well, but if you're even a little bit interested in the lore you won't be disappointed. It actually takes inspiration from the book “Roadside Picnic”, and in some aspects it's quite similar to that, the main difference being there is no alien intervention in the game events.

In short, we will be exploring the Chernobyl exclusion zone as a stalker who is affected by amnesia and is trying to recollect anything about himself and his past. The zone was contaminated by two nuclear disasters and aside from the radiation it has generated mutants, anomalies and special artifacts which have some powers and are really sought after by stalkers who sell them for profit.

At the time of this review I just completed the main story (unfortunately I found out afterwards that there are multiple ending possibilities, and the most common one will happen if you have a certain amount of money). The story though is just a means to get us moving forward, but it doesn't provide much lore about the world and its characters. In fact most of the information is scattered around the large semi open world hubs, in the form of PDAs, side quests and visual storytelling. I realize that completing the main quest I just barely scratched the surface of what this experience has to offer.

What makes this game special for me, however, is the atmosphere which is conveyed. Despite the technical limitations of its time and overall jankiness, Shadow of Chernobyl really shines at immersing us in its world, offering lots of possibilities, areas to explore in order to look for precious artifacts and stashes hidden around. Every location, even if a bit empty, feels handcrafted and has a lot of personality. I really loved exploring underground bunkers where weird experiments took place, abandoned buildings and occupied military bases. Everything has an Eastern European feeling which really fascinates me and actually enhances the overall environment. Every location has some story to tell, if you are patient and curious enough to find out.

This game oozes with lore. I actually found myself so fascinated by it that I turned a blind eye to the technical issues that plague it. The most annoying ones in my opinion are the somewhat frequent frame drops or freezes. It's amazing how some 17 years later SoC still struggles maintaining a consistent frame rate on any PC (I guess that won't ever be fixed), even though I must say that I had no problem during combat or tense situations, since those issues mostly presented themselves while traversing areas and moving around.

This review was really difficult to write because SoC is such a weird title. It has a unique setting, and it's kind of niche, so it's difficult to recommend it to everyone. Most people will probably be put off by the dated graphic presentation, or by the difficulty. But if you can get past the roughness of this game I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed. Recommended!

This is the first “modern” NFS title which I didn't finish, and for good reasons. This “game” should be avoided at all costs and forgotten into oblivion.

I will start with the few positives of this title, before diving on why this thing shouldn't be touched with a 10 feet pole.

The gameplay is the classic modern arcade style which the Need for Speed franchise got us used to, with accessible and enjoyable driving, plenty of vehicles to buy and upgrade and some “story” driven races with increasing difficulty. It's nothing new or special but still somewhat decent.

The graphics are pretty cool and convey a mix of NFS Underground and Japan street racing vibes (even though the game doesn't take place in Japan). Pretty stylish and unique overall.

Also performance is decent and the game is one of the best performing on Steam Deck.

The overall sound and music is ok, even though i didn't particularly love any of the tracks (which are also constantly ruined and interrupted by the continuous phone calls we’re going to receive at all times).

Ok now with the few positives out of the way, let's start with the bad news.

The game is an exclusively online mess.

Yes, I’m feeling “The Crew” vibes in every inch of my body. This game is basically on a timer, and given how small the player base currently is, I wouldn't be surprised if EA cut the support anytime soon. Which means this game will be totally unplayable pretty soon, thus making it wasted money if you intend to replay it in a few years.

The sad part is, this game doesn't even need to be strictly online. In fact, most of my poor experience and complaints for the game are caused by this issue. Let me explain.

While racing or traversing the city we will often meet other players, who will likely crash into us, thus annoying us in the better instances, while totally ruining a race in the worst case scenario (and this happened pretty often in my experience).

Also, the bag of trash which is the EA app, often loses connection, kicking me out of the game mid-race and forcing a reboot. When it doesn't crash or loses connection, we’ll often get kicked out of the servers which are constantly rebooted or shut down for maintenance (on the worst occasion it happened 3 times in the span of a 2 hours play session).

If you get disconnected for any reason, you'll start again from your garage, placing you often very far from the event you were partaking in, thus wasting a lot of time to get back there (of course there is no fast travel function).

After yet another crash of the EA app I decided I couldn't waste any more time on this pile of garbage and uninstalled.

Other minor complaints are:

In the first part of the game you'll get some really annoying tutorials popping up on screen mid races, making them unreadable and distracting from the actual gameplay
the story is cringe even for a NFS game, and the sad part is, some cutscenes aren't even skippable
As I mentioned before, you'll get bombarded by very distracting phone calls or messages all the time, during races, causing inconvenience and disrupting focus and immersion

In conclusion, in my opinion this NFS chapter should be absolutely skipped and forgotten, not even worth the discounted price for all the annoyance and frustration it caused me.

I liked the game even though it has some major flaws that I think are hard to gloss over.

The story is very interesting, it wants us to step into the shoes of Senua, a girl with psychosis, who embarks on a journey trying to defeat, or rather, accept, her illness. As events unfold we will hear and see what the protagonist hears and sees, so we will have strong visual and auditory hallucinations. The plot is set in northern Europe, during the Vikings era. Senua is on her way to Helheim, the realm of the dead, to ask the goddess Hela to resurrect her beloved Dillion, who died during a Norse raid, through the skull she carries with her.

The journey is thus a metaphor representing Senua's struggle to cope with and overcome the traumas and griefs she has had, also because of her mental condition. The story is very beautiful and touching, and is convincingly portrayed narratively. The developers were able to portray emotions visually and audibly, through the use of metaphors and allegories to represent them. Indeed, we will face and fight against illusions depicting demonic Norse warriors, gods, and frightening beasts, but we will also have to cope with deeper and more inexplicable fears, for example, darkness.

To enrich the setting, we will also find altars around that narrate some Norse myths and legends, and that made me want to delve into the subject with some books.

I didn't particularly enjoy the gameplay. It alternates between puzzle sections, usually not too challenging but fairly well-paced, and combat sections. The puzzles are fairly intuitive, although a couple of times I had to check a guide to figure it out. The fights are fairly easy but the mechanics are not explained (or did I miss a tutorial?) so I had to figure out the various types of attacks, dodges, etc. on my own. I did not understand if it is really possible to have a game over, I found myself on the ground many times but always managed to get up. All in all however the fighting is quite boring, it gets a little better in the last part, after we acquire the Gramr sword, which will be much more powerful than the one we had before.
The parts of the game that I enjoyed the most are the narrative parts, where we delve into the history and psyche of Senua but also of the other characters, her father Zynbel, her mother Galena and her companion Dillion.

The graphics are neat, the facial expressions are very realistic and manage to convey the feelings of the protagonist very well. Some sections are a bit monotonous, especially in the beginning, while the final part, especially in Helheim, in my opinion is masterfully realized, with breathtaking and also a bit distressing scenery.

The sound does its job and the voice actors are very good. From the very beginning we will be accompanied by the furies (the voices Senua constantly hears inside her head) who will speak to us most of the time and will be influenced by events and emotions. The narrator and all the other characters are also well characterized, mainly by the voice acting because we will see very little of them.

All in all, therefore, I liked this Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, despite the shortcomings at the gameplay level. I would recommend it as a sensory and narrative experience (especially in VR), while for those looking for a game that focuses more on action and combat I would recommend looking elsewhere.

I heard you don't like hand-holding. Well, you're in luck, because this game doesn't have any.

I always wanted to play the first System Shock, having played (and loved) some of its spiritual successors. I also love the immersive sim genre, Deus Ex being among my favorite games of all time. I always heard great things about System Shock but the issue was, unlike many other old school games, this one really hasn't aged well. I'm not talking about the graphics, which are a non-issue for me. The problem was the really clunky and dated control scheme and interface, requiring tons of bindings, swapping all the time between various menus, swapping between mouse movement and camera look, and so on. That’s basically why up until now I tried playing the game a couple of times but ultimately abandoned it really quickly.

But thankfully Nightdive came to the rescue and gave us this little gem of a remake.
Unfortunately this game didn't receive a massive coverage when it was released, but in my eyes it's still one of the best titles of 2023.

If you don't know the story, it's very simple. You play as a hacker, who gets caught while trying to hack into the Citadel, a private space station owned by TriOptimum Corporation. You then get brought onto the station and asked to hack Shodan, the AI controlling the station, in order to remove her ethical restraints. In return, the CEO of TriOptimum, Edward Diego, promises you freedom and a very expensive neural interface implant. After the hack is successfully completed though, you are put into cryogenic sleep and wake up 6 months later, in the aftermath of the disaster which unfolded on Citadel after Shodan went rogue.
This is what is explained in the first few minutes of the game, then you're left basically on your own dealing with the Citadel and Shodan or dying trying.

The gameplay style is similar to a dungeon crawler with sci-fi setting. The levels are big mazes, with lots and lots of rooms, corridors, secret passages, doors and bridges to unlock, puzzles to solve and loot to find. There is also a lot of shooting, and although we won't gain XP and level up, we will be able to upgrade weapons and acquire new items which will grant us perks, such as a biohazard / radiation suit or thrusted boots. Enemies are plenty and some of them will respawn after a while, so we need to pay attention all the time and try not to waste too many resources or we’ll risk running out.

The objective of the game is to proceed, unlocking every level / floor of the Citadel, and slowly sabotaging Shodan’s cores, preventing her from destroying Earth and turning humankind into biomechanical abominations.
Shodan reminded me of characters like HAL9000 but much much crazier. She considers herself a goddess and her plans are totally insane. The more we will damage her, the more she will go ballistic trying to stop us. Shodan has tons of character, also thanks to some amazing voice acting, which will perfectly convey how crazy she is.

If Shodan is the mind, and Citadel her body, we will be a virus, slowly infecting and killing her.
Completing every floor feels like slowly putting together a puzzle, everything clicks in its place perfectly. It won't be easy though because we'll need a lot of patience and we'll be required to pay attention to audio logs scattered around the levels. Those won't just help us understand the lore, but they'll contain important information on what to do next, how to unlock certain things, and so on. After a while, I found myself taking notes of everything I deemed important, and I still had to check a guide a couple of times because I wasn't sure on what to do next. This might seem like a flaw but I actually loved it! It forced me to think and actively use my brain instead of just following a marker to the next objective. It was stimulating and it kept me thinking about the game even when I was doing other stuff during my daily life. I think too many games nowadays are extremely concerned with not scaring away players, while in fact the satisfaction of solving a hard puzzle is totally worth some frustration, in my opinion.

There are some sections of the game requiring you to hack into cyberspace. Those are probably the less entertaining ones, even though from what I've seen they are pretty faithful to the original. Basically it consists of shooting sections with 6 degrees of freedom movement style and a digital sci-fi vibe, with very colorful textures and polygonal enemies. Those sections let you unlock doors or other stuff in the levels and sometimes they can be fairly challenging. I didn't find them particularly annoying, albeit during the first few times I felt a bit nauseous, a similar experience to trying VR for the first time (not as intense, of course).
Puzzles on the other hand are really cool and relaxing. They are a great way to vary the pace of the game and I loved them. There is even a full chess board at some point, which gives you the opportunity to play some chess against a competent AI, and although it’s completely optional it gives the opportunity, if completed, to earn a nice upgrade.

Graphically the game in my opinion is an absolute masterpiece. It managed to perfectly grasp the atmosphere it wants to convey, giving some really cool cyberpunk sci-fi vibes and really helping the immersion. I also loved the fact that many textures have been purposefully pixelated, in order to convey the origins of the game. In my opinion they blend perfectly with the rest of the more modern textures and contribute to a really cool 90’s sci-fi aesthetic.
I also really love how colors are used, giving each level some unique identity and making them really pop. Items are wuite recognizable and it's hard to miss important stuff.

Sound is also pretty good, the soundtrack was remade for this title, bringing a more subtle, ambient-like music, which explodes during important events or combats. The style is different from the midi electronic and kinda upbeat music of the original game, but I can't tell which is the better one. In my opinion they are both great soundtracks.

On the negative side I had a few performance issues, even though the frame rate was well above 90 fps all the time, in some sections it felt like the latency had some spikes, and a couple of times the game crashed, like if there was some kind of memory leak (unfortunately I couldn't check if that was actually the case).
Another small issue I encountered was in the log menu, when after opening a message I couldn't control anymore the scrolling in the menu and I had to switch menus to get control back.
Overall though those were minor issues for me and they didn't ruin my experience, although I hope they’ll get fixed eventually.

In conclusion my experience was really awesome, I'm super happy I finally completed this classic title (looking forward to System Shock 2 as well!) and I recommend it to everyone who is at least slightly interested in the genre. This remake is a real labor of love and you can feel the care and attention to detail the devs put into it. I think you won't get disappointed!

A few tips for new players:
- Remember to quicksave often!!! The game has few autosaves so quicksaving will be really important.
- Take notes of everything which seems useful, such as codes, numbers, locations… I used the steam overlay notes function and it really helped out
- The previous point also can apply to seemingly useful items such as, for example, circuit boards, explosives, heads (?)…..
- If you can't wrap your head around some stuff, don't feel embarrassed to check some guides / tips online. There are also plenty of options to customize the various aspects of the game, if you are so inclined.

Have fun!

I noticed that some of my reviews were enjoyed by the community, I wouldn't have expected that, so if you read up to this point I just wanted to say thank you, I appreciate it a lot! Have a nice day!