Recent reviews by 星

Larian Studios has pulled off a masterpiece with their entry into the Baldur's Gate franchise, set in the Sword Coast region of Faerûn, it creates an epic adventure with plenty of options on how to approach it.

Even from the high quality of the initial release, Larian has polished, expanded and added to the existing content without charging for additional DLC or cut content repackaged as such, as you see commonly elsewhere in the game development industry. It truly sets a qualitative standard of excellence among game developers.

Baldur's Gate 3 is everything you should expect from a CRPG, and I cannot understate the amount of fun I've had both solo and coop in this game, truly, a recommendable experience and also has very much a replayablility factor with classes and their options as well as a dark urges mode, as well as multiple difficulty settings, so whether you are new to CRPGs or a veteran, there is something for you here.

It's essentially F2P Diablo 2.5 with a novel idea with skill trees for classes, is a fun dungeon crawling experience, is an always online one, so better with friends; and make sure your internet connection is good on hardcore/permadeath mode. The inventory tetris can get a bit trying though at times. But overall, a good game.

This is a good remastering of C&C Tiberian Dawn & Red Alert, it includes a lot of nice stuff including improved AI and very lovely remastered soundtrack + cut songs by Frank Klepacki, who did the original soundtrack back in the day.

I like how they combined all the extra missions together and it does also include the Red Alert console missions. At least it no longer has the crashes on higher resolutions for some missions as the original did, not designed for modern systems. I'm glad they worked with people like Nyerguds to achieve this outcome.

If anything was a drawback, I would say I'm a bit sad at the AMVs for the old campaigns being upscaled as they are, but ultimately, this is awesome and I hope we can expect more remasters of the likes of Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2.

Overall, I really like it and it is a solid remaster and very much well worth the money they're asking for.

Classic turn-based strategy with real-time battles. Easy to sink many hours into.

Reminds me of what a 3D visualisation of NationsGame (now Nations) would be.

Fairly fun nation sim that's not just a spreadsheet browser sim. Obviously better with friends.

Also has a really responsive and nice developer who's very helpful.

It's a good game, but it has a great modder community.

This is a good and fun addition to the Fallout franchise, although it does lack when it comes to dialogue options being very meaningful and there are some annoying sidequests which can be auto-added. There's still a lot of fun to be had regardless, and some funny collision physics to either laugh at or be frustrated by.

Not a fan of the Creation Club, but that paid mods section can be skipped over, although it will take up precious disk space.

However, there's a huge modding community that provides even better content for free, so that's a plus too.

All in all, I'd recommend giving this game a try if you like the Fallout series (since Bethesda acquired it); and if you haven't played either Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas, give Fallout: NV a playthrough first and then move forward to this.

Half-Life 2 is a game worthy as the successor to Half-Life, the original adventure of the crowbar wielding MIT graduate, Gordon Freeman. In the interim from the time of the Black Mesa Incident, the world has turned into an awful dystopia. This is the beginning of a gripping adventure to set things right. There's some puzzle solving in addition to the well-paced action, and the environments are fairly diverse as you traverse through the game. The FPS mechanics are solid and the physics are as promised. The story is well-written and the characters memorable. It's still as fun now as when I got it, a game that has aged well and continues to be a great game.


Still waiting for Half-Life 2 Episode 3 and then the followup Half-Life 3, Valve.

I was looking forward to No Man's Sky for quite some time, having watched the dev playthrough.

Sadly, while the game is still fun, I was disappointed by a few things and I feel the game hasn't lived up to its potential in addition to lacking polish and having performance issues, especially considering what it is sold at.

For instance, I encountered dialogue strings when learning alien/Gek words and it would display as 'GekWordX' with X being the word learnt, rather than what I'd seen previously where the string/value had a proper display along the lines of 'You've learned the Gek word for isotope.' etc.

When entering a space station (which is an automated process) I clipped through the side supports close to the roof. Thankfully there wasn't collision detection and/or damage as I had been expecting, but it was another strike against it in terms of lack of polish.

There's also times in-game where the game slows down inexplicably (all actions take longer to complete, even quitting), however it's fixed by quitting and restarting the game; still an annoyance however and it wrecks immersion, along with the other aforementioned points.

The 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 (long 18 trillion) planets being procedurally generated that are on offer is an impressive feat, there is no denying that. The exploration is fun for me and that's its best feature too. So far I've found a variety of planets, although I was a bit disappointed that exploration in caves or underwater doesn't yield different materials to be found comparative to the surface, although it does for floræ and faunæ.

Some of the game's mechanics feel 'grindy,' with resource collection and inventory management. The survival aspect of this feels like it could have stood to have been more fleshed out before release, as it's currently, have X on hand to power/refill Y, which is fairly boring, the most interesting thing is having to craft hyperdrive fuel, and that's buy one item, mix with mined resources a couple of times and ta-da~, fuel! Moreover, the cataloguing of planets can also get tedious, especially with identifying flying creatures, although perhaps some may enjoy that as a challenge; it's fun the first couple of planets, but eventually became boring as time progressed and I'd been playing the game for a while.

The visuals are nice from afar, and the game looks fairly good. As for audio, that's fairly decent too, although some of the notices for life support are annoying like 75% being 'low' - something closer to '75% and falling,' perhaps with a speed modifier based on rate of decrease would be more descriptive and helpful. The HUD is decent, although not being able to buy and sell through the same trade screen UI is disappointing (there should be buy/sell buttons to switch between modes at the bottom of the interface instead or something similar).

Having played through a family member's copy of the game, the reversion of my discoveries being attributed to them sporadically (and shown when I re-enter the game after quiting) is interesting, given that it's intermittent and doesn't apply to every discovery that you make, makes me think it's yet another bug. While I don't mind sharing the credit, I do find it a slightly amusing fault in the game and it's worth mentioning as something that stood out when discovering things and looking back at past discoveries. It might be confusing for someone in the future to see similar names or theming on a planet by two different players erroneously because of this (for me this adds to the humorous part).

Now, if this game wasn't charging a AAA price of $60 USD, then sure, I could accept issues like this, since it's a game made by a small team, although they (Hello Games) did get backing from Sony towards release. A more reasonable price for the content on offer is perhaps $30 USD, being generous given its current state, as it feels like a $20-30 Indie game. Don't get me wrong, it's still enjoyable, but I can't recommend it at the price it's asking for.

Which is a shame, because it has some good points about it and would definitely be worth a lesser sale price. At the moment, it feels a bit like an overpriced tech demo at $60 USD.

As someone who pre-ordered, originally, I could not have recommended the game, as I essentially paid for a Beta in terms of bugs and polish. This still galls to this day and I would not pre-order a Total War game again.

After many patches and post-polishing, I can cautiously recommend this as a decent addition to the Total War franchise. Its overall mechanics aren't super, such as the nerf to culture change, where you now have default culture that cannot be converted, leaving permanent unhappiness in conquered territories of a foreign culture.

The battle mechanics are solid, although there are some clear carry-overs from Shogun 2. They never did families or the in-depth politics as promised. Despite that, the game is still fun, although it can get a bit stale when you get to a big empire stage against other similarly big empires. The AI does not always function as intended still, although the related game-breaking bugs have at least been eliminated.

A lot more time was spent with attention to history this time around, no ancient Egyptians, you now get proper diadochi. Some factions rosters are a bit sparse, and non-playable powers aren't worked into the system of buffs/tradeoffs you get choosing a faction or family for the playable ones.

Many of the faults and gripes can be fixed with mods, but it shouldn't be on the shoulder of the modwright to carry a game.

Ultimately, get this on sale in a bundle, there's many hours of game to explore, but it's not worth full price, in my opinion. And the DLCs are some of the better and more fun content.