Recent reviews by ⍟Tex

I have been looking forward to playing this game, ever since I completed Beyond Two Souls a couple of years ago. Finally, the time came, once again, for a story driven quick time event title.

I will start with the theme and atmosphere, since this game reminded me a lot of the movie Seven, which I totally love. It's this noir, filled with heavy hearted moments, investigations, characters who hide a dark side and overall a really gray mood. Throughout the whole game it's raining (this is also a key plot point) and that really sets the tone for everything that happens.

I don't want to spoil anything about the story, but after a bit of a slow and cringe introduction we’re thrown into the events and the game won't step off the gas pedal until the end.

I totally loved the narration, and I wanted to know so badly how it progressed that I pretty much completed the game in a couple of sessions. In my opinion it is totally worth playing just for the story alone.

I also have some strong criticism towards this title though. First of all the controls and QTE system. I found the events slightly harder than in Beyond two Souls, and a tad more punishing if failed. That isn't actually a major issue, but in the end I got one of the worst endings because I messed up some sections due to the aforementioned QTEs and the fact that they were kinda hard to perform. One big issue I had was that playing with a Steam Deck, albeit providing us with everything we need to properly control the game, it's a bit inconvenient. For example, when I needed to shake the controller or to turn it around, I had to do that with the whole device, making the screen impossible to see and potentially missing the next prompt when it showed on screen.
Probably the best way to play this game would be through a PlayStation controller, but in the end I got through with the deck despite the inconveniences.

Another minor complaint I have is about the graphics, in particular the facial expressions. Often characters try to convey emotions but they end up just looking goofy and cringe, breaking the immersion just a tad. This is unavoidable given the age of the game, but Beyond, which came out just 3 years later, managed a much better result in that regard.

Sound in this game was masterfully crafted, both music and sound effects. The mixing is perfect and the voice acting is really great; I have no complaints in this regard.

Gameplay wise, aside from the QTEs, I found the controls a bit stiff and unintuitive. The sudden change of camera angles make controlling the characters harder, and I think it could have really benefited from a tank style control scheme.

All in all, the game in my opinion has a major flaw in its gameplay, which could have been done better. Despite that, I really recommend it for its story. It also has quite a bit of replayability since our choices can significantly change the outcome of the game. If you like the noir / thriller genre, definitely go for it!

A remaster which needs tinkering just to properly show on screen, and doesn't work out of the box. I would rather call this a cash grab instead. Another classic ruined.

I came across this game thanks to a Nexpo video, so I decided to grab it and give it a try.
I’m glad I did, because it’s a pretty great horror game, with an emphasis on psychological and body horror.
The game is pretty simple and quite short (a couple of hours long), so I don’t want to spoil much. It’s all centered around the emotional shortcomings of a young kid, Adrienne, whose parents don’t really show her affection and constantly fight against each other, therefore the little girl tries to fulfill her emotional needs through other venues. Finally she finds some in the basement of her new house.

I wouldn't say the game is scary, but it surely is disturbing. Graphics are simple but get the job done. The grim and dark tones really convey a sense of uneasiness. Sound is also great, I especially appreciated when grandpa speaks, it sent shivers down my spine.

Overall a pretty neat experience, recommended!

Everyone knows Grand Theft Auto, so I won't say the obvious. I will just focus on what I liked more and less about it compared to its predecessor GTA IV.
Also I will focus on the single player, since I haven't touched the online and I have no intention of doing so anytime soon.

Last year I played GTA IV for the first time (aside from a short moment in 2008 when I tried it on PS3 at a friend's house). I loved it, just like all GTA episodes since 3 (haven't played 1 and 2 yet). Consequently this year I decided to play GTA V, it just took me a bit more than 10 years since its release (or 9 if we consider the PC release, but I digress).

Well in general I totally loved it. For starters I really liked that it performs very well, unlike IV which was still difficult to run even on a very powerful modern PC. I managed to play it with everything maxed out at 1440p with only minor slowdowns in the most grass intensive areas. The game looks gorgeous, even almost 10 years after the PC release. Everything feels handcrafted and really detailed, as it's tradition with the series.
The plot is also really good, this time following three different characters with intertwined stories. I'd say Trevor was the highlight of the three, but in general the writing is stellar, as usual.
On this note though, I have to say when I completed the game I was still craving for more story. Unlike GTA IV, this last chapter doesn't have any single player DLC and so it felt considerably shorter than its previous chapter.

Another thing I was slightly disappointed with is the driving and vehicles in general. GTA IV adopted a realistic take on driving, which many hated but I personally loved, being also a fan of the Driver series.
GTA V takes a complete U-turn on this, with cars which are glued to the ground and are built like tanks. You can even roll over the car if you accidentally flip it. Even t-boning someone at top speed feels like nothing and I never managed to total a car unless I actually did it on purpose (mainly shooting or throwing explosives at it). It felt like Rockstar wanted to say sorry for the previous game choice and overcompensated with this one.

A thing I immensely appreciated this time around was instead the great reduction in phone time and boring activities like hanging out with people and trying to satisfy everyone. That aspect of GTA IV was probably the most annoying for me, so I'm glad they tuned it down significantly in GTA V.

Overall then, other than some minor complaints I totally enjoyed this masterpiece and I look forward to GTA VI if it gets released, eventually.

Recommended!

This second chapter is in my opinion a direct improvement over the previous game in various aspects.

To begin with, there are more races and cars available. The game took me almost twice the time to finish compared to the first chapter.

Some of the issues I had with the first chapters were ironed out, such as the sometimes quirky collision detection which often saw me flying out of the car for minimal bumps.
The music was also an improvement in my books.

The driving feels good and responsive, and the cars, especially towards the end, are plenty fast.

Not much to add as this is just a “more and better” version of the first game.

Recommended!

I'm so happy I finally played this latest chapter of the Deus Ex series. This game is in my opinion actually really good and a push in the right direction both from a gameplay and story perspective.

I won't spoil much of the plot but Mankind Divided takes place 2 years after the events of Human Revolution, after the “incident” which involved all augs turning rogue for a brief moment and causing panic and thousands of deaths. In the aftermath, “naturals” developed some fear that such an event could occur again, thus causing turmoil which soon got embraced by many politicians and businessmen who wanted to profit from the situation.
We will play again as Adam Jensen, who recovered from the events of the previous chapter and now has to navigate through Prague, a city formerly spearheading the augmentation route, and now torn by a fierce apartheid between augs and non-augmented citizens.
I really loved how this is conveyed, through the hostility of (most) law enforcers, frequent checkpoints with thorough papers checks, separation on the metro trains between augs and non-augs, even snippets of conversations between NPCs and the environmental storytelling in general.

The atmosphere developers managed to set up is, in my opinion, really a work of art, capable of conveying the tension and ultimately the struggle of people who suddenly found themselves outcasts in a society which rejected their irreversible choice of augmenting their bodies.
The themes are really deep and extremely current. I would say this was the most mature and grim Deus Ex title so far, in my opinion.

Gameplay wise, not much has changed, thankfully. Prague is a sort of big semi-open world hub where most of the story develops, especially secondary missions. Main story missions take place in other areas too, such as Golem City (a ghetto where most augs are now confined outside of Prague), a secret base located on the swiss Alps, a skyscraper in London and so on.

Levels are big and open-ended, letting the player choose their favorite way to reach the objectives, depending on their builds. As tradition, I played the “give me deus ex” difficulty using a mix of stealth and lethal force to reach mission goals, and I had a ton of fun. Jensen is a real badass, now sporting some new and more powerful augmentations alongside those of the previous game. The special agent vibes are all there, and aside from some annoying bug (sometimes I got spotted through the walls by police officers two floors above me, luckily the invisibility “cloak” is still super effective) the flow is great and the mechanics work really well.
Overall the game checks all the right boxes for the immersive sim genre.

Graphics are good, although I felt the game could be better optimized. I played it on a 5800X3D / 6950 XT system, @1440p ultra and I felt like capping the framerate at 60 was the best choice to not sacrifice any visual fidelity and still get a (mostly) smooth frame pacing.
Overall though textures are very high quality and every section felt really handcrafted with tons of attention to detail.
Lighting is great too, even though there's no ray tracing, and the game looks really gorgeous in general.

As per tradition, the soundtrack is full of bangers and dynamically adapts to the situation. Sound effects and voice acting are mostly flawless too, expectedly I would say, given the triple A budget kind of game.

I have a couple of minor complaints, including the aforementioned bugs and the ending, which basically leaves us on a cliffhanger and with no sequel in sight even eight years later (the game was originally released in 2016). Hopefully then this franchise gets once again soon revitalized with a proper sequel, bringing forward a legacy in gaming which spans over nearly a quarter of a century.

Great game overall, recommended!!

The year is 2028 and we're in the middle of the war against Skynet. The world is in rubble and only a few humans are still alive. As Jacob Rivers, soldier of the resistance and only survivor of his division, we will try to reach the rest of the resistance, John Connor, and ultimately beat Skynet.
The plot is pretty simple and generic, nothing to write home about, but it's serviceable.

I could define the gameplay as “immersive sim light” since it presents immersive sim elements but don't expect anywhere near deus ex / dishonored levels of depth. Still, we can decide whether to approach situations in a stealthy way or guns blazing, we can customize weapons, completing objectives will grant XP and will unlock skill nodes which we can choose between (even though, towards the end of the game we will basically unlock everything on the skill tree). Many of the dialogues will present multiple choices, and we will be able to gain trust from other characters, and ultimately decide to save their lives or not.

The levels are semi-open, usually with multiple paths available to reach a given objective, but they are mostly corridors, with very few branches. Still, I enjoyed exploring and scavenging for crafting resources.

Controls feel pretty tight, shooting and stealth mechanics are good enough and overall the gameplay is quite enjoyable.
I would strongly recommend playing it at least in hard mode, since normal felt a bit too easy and kinda boring for me.

Graphics are, once again, good enough for an enjoyable experience, although I should point out I experienced some pretty annoying glitches which broke my immersion, from time to time. For example sometimes the terrain lowered while I moved towards it, with a weird “melting” effect. Other times models were misplaced, for example when part of the van was placed inside the column of a building.
Otherwise, the game ran really smoothly with everything maxed out, and it's pretty lightweight / optimized.

The part where Terminator: Resistance really shined, at least in my opinion, was in the atmosphere and presentation.

The game is mainly inspired from the first two Terminator movies, and it shows.
In the movies, there are just a handful of scenes showing the future war with the machines, and from those the devs really did some good work to extrapolate an accurate game world. Cities became piles of rubble, everything is barren and devoid of life. The only things moving around are the machines, searching everywhere for survivors to terminate.

Sometimes the game even managed to unsettle me a bit. The parts where you have to run or hide from terminators, at least for me, were really quite tense.

Everything is accompanied by the gorgeous soundtrack, which is heavily inspired by Terminator 2’s theme and it tremendously enhances the overall atmosphere. I strongly recommend checking it out, even if you don't end up buying the game.

The DLC was also pretty good, and infiltrator mode is a quite fun mini game giving us a taste of what being a terminator is like.

Overall then, even though the game feels a bit generic and some of the gameplay elements could have been explored more, it was fun and I don't regret playing it at all.
Also this is the best Terminator video game made so far, and even though that was a pretty low bar to clear, it was still a success in that regard.

Recommended, especially if you like Terminator movies and / or the game is on discount.

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!