Recent reviews by rhf-jection

In an alternate universe, we'll have "Dragon's Dogma-likes" instead of "Souls-likes"

Shame this kind of game didn't catch on.

I've got about 200-300 hours of DD:DA on Xbox 360, with an additional 72 hours of it on steam and honestly, the microtransactions and questionable PC performance are the least of this game's problems.

It's kinda like going from GTA: San Andreas to GTA 4 (without EFLC). (90%+ of people who are interested in DD2 probably haven't touched DD:DA so I'm not gonna explain every single change)

Yes, the game is good, but the problem is that it's just "fine" and not great like DD:DA.

DD:DA goes on sale (84% off) quite frequently, just buy it instead and you'll have a better time with it than DD2.

I think it's pretty crazy for a AAA game released in 2023 to:
-not have any DLC that adds items that give players an advantage (deluxe DLC just adds cosmetics, apart from 1 item that gives a common spell that most classes can access)
-not have any intrusive DRM (or always online, in fact you can just run the game without steam running if you wanted to)
-not to have any microtransactions, season passes, or battle pass crap
-be (relatively easy) to mod without 1000 necessary frameworks or dependency hell (i.e. bethesda games)
-be pretty well optimized (at least for GPU), no unnecessary 8k textures ballooning up VRAM usage

and, still be fun to boot (I don't even know anything about D&D and still had a good time).

Somewhere in the T10/PGG offices, they forgot that premium edition owners were entitled to a 2nd DLC expansion, so they cobbled this together in what feels like a month. It's actually even less fun than the Lego DLC from FH4, which is really saying something.
What's worse is that Forza Horizon 1 also had a rally expansion, and provides a much better rallying experience than this DLC.

What's good about this DLC (not including free stuff like anti lag turbo or launch control):

• Road layout has lots of tight corners
  
• The one road in the canyon that has natural walls on both sides

What's bad about this DLC (TL;DR, everything else):

• 24 Normal routes, +3 "showdown routes", + 1 Goliath, normal routes can be played in both staged rally or normal horizon race mode (12 cars crowded in tight tracks), you have to complete each normal route twice (once in rally and once in race mode) for completion, which feels like padding
  
• Rally mode's opponents are literally just pulled from your friends list even though there's no AI present in the times (they seriously couldn't just reuse the NPC names from the trial for some reason)
  
• Rally mode's co-driver doesn't even sit with you in the same car, but instead from an annoying omnipresent helicopter that only follows you (even in race modes), which is probably done to accommodate the few one seater vehicles
  
• No option to turn off said helicopter unless you make a specific blueprint to do so (it flies way too low to the ground and actively makes rallying harder by putting dust in front of where you're going and in the case of night events, shining a spotlight on your vehicle so the ground ahead of you is harder to see)
  
• Calls in rally mode suck - they're too late and aren't very detailed, plus there's pointless calls like "chicken" or "bridge"
  
• For a DLC with a rally theme, there is only ONE actual rally vehicle added with this expansion, the rest being 1 EV pickup, and a bunch of buggies/trophy trucks (who cares)
  
• The map's visual style is basically identical to the base game's map - you'd think that the reason being that the maps would be connected to the main game's map, but they don't, which means you'll forget about the DLC after you complete everything in it (boy, I love sitting through a 2 minute loading screen everytime I want to travel between maps)
  
• The update that released with this DLC also introduces really annoying bugs (related to crashing), such as your game crashing if you load a tune that's made before the update, random crashing when you finish a race, infinite loading etc.

and all of this, for the standalone price of Dirt Rally 2.0.

Quite literally the best Yakuza/RGG game, even if it's technically a spinoff.
I'd even say its got the best combat, story and soundtrack out of all of them.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME - A bug that was introduced a month ago causes your game to not launch (we've had 2 updates since that straight up do not address the issue), this "bug" was introduced as a method of combating script kiddies from setting obviously hacked leaderboard times (they still exist, but they purged some leaderboard entries INCLUDING legit ones: https://twitter.com/DonJoewonSong/status/1593316430426013700). The devs refuse to ACTUALLY fix the problem (they redirect you to support, only for them to wave you away: https://i.imgur.com/T4M7Tgc.png (this is how forza's official support treats you, by telling you to go to "official" support?)). Plus, the devs are SUPER ban happy if they don't like the livery you made or other dumb things, but they WON'T ban script kiddies or cheaters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3RuYvfV0VA

Play these instead if you want an open world racing game:
NFS Unbound and The Crew 2 - both are modern and pretty decent, but then you'd be giving money to EA and ubisoft, buy these on sale
Test Drive Unlimited 1 and 2 (with mods like TDU platinum and TDU2 RS) - slightly older, but much bigger map (you'll have to look up alternative methods of "acquiring" these)

This is a review of the port of Halo Reach as part of the Halo: Master Chief Collection.
I have played the original Xbox 360 version of Reach, as well as playing it on backwards compatibility on the Xbone.

Additionally, I have also played every Halo game (except for Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike, because who actually remembers those existing?) if that matters.

Keep in mind, at the time of writing this review the only game accessible is Reach and Forge mode (the custom in-game map editing tool) and theater mode (watch replays) is not available.

What's good about the port:

• It's available on Steam and not JUST the UWP store, which means you don't have to downgrade to Windows 10 to play it (you read that right, DOWNGRADE to Windows 10, because Windows 7 is the perfect iteration of Windows)
  
• It runs really well (although considering that it's a 2010 game made to run on a 7th gen console you probably would be expecting it to run pretty well even on a laptop)
  
• Controls are almost fully re-bindable on KB/M, an addition of a text chat (as well as a text to speech option for the text chat is also a really nice addition)

What's bad about the port:

• The game uses the normal UI for menus that can be found on the Xbone version of the MCC which is horrendous (huge squares everywhere instead of a small list at the corner of the screen and is clearly not designed for KB/M usage, I had to use the arrow keys to properly navigate the menus). Here's what the UI is supposed to look like , instead of this abomination. Additionally, the intro has also been replaced with a pretty generic 343 industries logo, which kind of detracts from the feel of the game.
  
• You can't vote on maps when matchmaking. Did you get a map you didn't like? Better leave.
  
• Text Chat and Voice Chat keys cannot be re-bound. If you like to use "T" for text chat or use "V" or "J" for any other keybind, then you're out of luck.
  
• The game uses your XBL display name, which means that you're stuck with whatever name you made as a 12 year old (If I remember correctly, MS charges you for name changes although a quick search suggests they don't do that anymore) although this is probably for cross-play purposes.

Other notes:

• Gun sound is pretty crap when you boot it up for the first time, but can be easily fixed with a simple INI tweak [www.pcgamingwiki.com].
  
• Unlike the other MCC Halo games on the Xbone (where all the armor is unlocked, but you can only choose full sets without mixing and matching), you have to grind to unlock the armor, and it looks like the unlocks are on some sort of rotation (Right now you can only unlock some of the helmets), but at least you can mix and match again.
  
• People are complaining about aim assist/bullet magnetism when using a controller, except it's existed in Halo as early as Halo 2. Again, this is probably for cross-play purposes so people using controllers wouldn't get obliterated by KB/M users (If you have good aim on KB/M, you can easily beat a controller user anyway)

Overall, this is a great port, but if the super ugly menu really irritates you, you should just play Reach as backwards compatibility on Xbone.

Thanks sega, looks like I can skip buying judgement on PS4 if I know it'll come to PC in about a year

It's a simple, but fun TPS

This is a great game to play, if you make self-imposed challenges on yourself, and with mods