Recent reviews by sol

The best roguelike deckbuilder since Slay the Spire.
The art, music, and vibes are amazing.
The level of complexity and cool combos are capital.
The amount of progression will have you unlocking stuff for a long while.
This game ticks all the right boxes for me.

Right now I'd say it's an 8.5/10.
I haven't fully finished the game yet, but so far my experience has been very positive. However, it does need some improvements for me to rate it any higher. If you're still on the fence, wait a bit longer for a few more patches and the game will be in a grand state.
If you want the best possible experience: Go in blind. Make a character and run with it, don't restart over and over. There will be more playthroughs to look forward to. You will NOT see all the content in one playthrough and that's perfectly fine. I've even begun purposefully ignoring content for later playthroughs. If you want to restart because you're dissatisfied with your build, don't. You can respec pretty early on for cheap.

On to some of my reasoning.
Bugs: The issue is, now that I'm nearing the end I'm noticing a lot of bugs and inconsistencies. It can be expected for such a massive game to not have every thread with every npc resolved, but there are some major ones. Things like the entire population of a location being decimated (for a failed combat which many people have lost), and then many npcs including major ones referencing that place as if it's still a safe haven full of not-dead people. Characters who have died in some way popping back up alive in later acts. Npcs insisting through dialogue that you had done something earlier in the story that you certainly hadn't.
On top of that there's a lot of minor bugs that don't detract to much from the gameplay but are mildly annoying at best. It would also be nice for more quality of life features such as better tooltips on abilities that give more information, a way to see later levels for a class without having to look through a wiki, and a way to access the inventories of camp members that aren't currently in your party.

Gameplay: Aside from these issues, the game is fantastic. It's a great translation of the 5e system and offers a lot of potential for growth upon it as well. The elements they took from Divinity 1 and 2 and meshed with the gameplay of 5e such as elevation mechanics and shoving (god I love shoving) really make combat something I look forward to always. As someone pretty well versed in both the Divinity series, and 5th edition D&D, the game has become really easy, even on tactician, due to the massive amount of magic items and consumables and over-leveling from wanting to see all the content. I've fixed the difficulty using mods, but I would love for another official difficulty mode, perhaps one that increases the scarcity of consumables and makes enemies have even more hp.

Story: This here is what makes Baldur's Gate 3 so good, and would be enough to keep me playing even if the combat wasn't quite as good. The story is fantastic and seriously engaging. The colorful cast of characters feel dynamic and intriguing, and characters that I didn't really like at first (Lae'zel, how about you develop a personality?) I ended up really liking later on (forgive what I said Lae'zel, turns out you've got personality in spades) just like, you know, real people. Turns out, you can end up finding good qualities in people that you had bad first impressions of, who knew? The growth feels organic in most cases, though I wish there was a little more emotion and build-up to big decisions in some of Shadowheart's pivotal scenes (she's the first character I'm romancing so I've paid particularly close attention to her story, not sure about other companions). However, this can easily be fixed, and it seems Larian has promised to do so as they've recently done for Karlach's ending and dialogue options throughout the game.
The many branching paths of the story itself offer a lot of replayability, and talking with my friends about our experiences in Act 1 made it clear that some of us took very different paths in our game and have different npcs following their journey in their games because of it. That makes me really excited for my next playthrough, even though I haven't even finished my first yet.
The dialogue cinematics, though sometimes a little goofy looking, really add a lot of character to the interactions. Divinity 1 and 2's text boxes, despite the great voice acting, didn't really invoke that personal feeling that you get from seeing facial expressions and body movements. I feel way more connected to a lot of characters because of it than I did in Divinity 2, simply because I can see them move.

In summary, the game is a flawed diamond. If you're an rpg fan then you'll want to play this game as it's possibly the greatest ever made once Larian finishes polishing it up more. It's got the potential for astounding beauty and I feel like it will influence rpgs of it's genre for generations just as its predecessors did. Combat is fun and interesting. The story is fresh and very engaging with many twists and turns. The worldbuilding is phenomenal, and Owlbears can sit in chairs which looks very goofy.

Lots of potential. Loving the hell out of it

Easily one of the best games of all time.

Now that Arcade Edition is out I can finally review this game.

It's a good game. Arcade Edition finally added what it needed to be complete. It has its share of issues, but it's still fun and one of the better fighting games out there. It's easy to get into and it has a lot of singleplayer content now that AE is out. It's got great presentation and it feels satisfying to play.


(also Sakura is the best waifu)

I'd say that this is easily my favorite "Bethesda" game of all time, except that it's made by Obsidian.

I LOVE this game to death. It's got so much charm, so many ways to play and finish the game. It feels like every single dialogue has different ways to experience it. Fallout 4 may have had better gunplay, but it didn't have the same feeling that New Vegas did. You have so many options on how you want to play this game. Do you want to be a smooth talker who gets out of situations by swindling people? Do you want to be a sneaky stabsman who kills people before they even notice you? Maybe you'll reverse pickpocket a grenade into someone's trousers as they sit idly drinking their Sunset Sarsparilla™. Maybe you're so smart that you make people cower in fear at the sheer size of your intellect. Or, perhaps, you can just grab the nearest rebar pole with some cement sticking to it and murder rampage your way through the game.

Every piece of dialouge has so many options and ways to get through. Unlike Fallout 4's limited 4 option dialogue stolen straight from a Bioware game, Fallout New Vegas often has 6 or 7 dialogue options per.

Despite the dry desert surrounding, the world in New Vegas feels far more alive and dynamic than Fallout 4 did. Random patrols of raiders, legionnaires, the brotherhood, mixed with folks and traders just travelling and trying not to get eaten by that Deathclaw that just saw them (rather poorly I might add). The hostility and tension between so many major and minor factions adds so much to the world, and factions (specifically faction reputation) are something I sorely missed from Fallout 4 as a result.

On top of it all, the one thing that New Vegas did miles better than any other Bethesda game is dialogue and character development. When you think of a companion from Skyrim you think of someone who carries your stuff, maybe has a few repeating voice lines, occasionally comments about mudcrabs. In Fallout 4 your companions have interesting quests and personalities that develop as you play. You find them in all sorts of precarious situations such as Raul the ghoul mechanic held hostage by an insane schizophrenic nightkin Super Mutant, or Boone whose wife and child went missing. Even ED-E and Rex have personalities and they can't even speak. Companions aren't the only characters that shine in this game though. I could go on for hours talking about how great the npcs are. The random quest givers, the guy who "won" the lottery, Mr. Fantastic, Jason Bright, Harland, and on and on.

Another thing I love about New Vegas is that you can be EVIL. In Fallout 4, sure you can do some "bad" stuff, you can join the Institute or hunt down synths with the Brotherhood. But ultimately there is one type of character you can be, and that is: the distressed father or mother who wants to find his/her son and help people along the way. In New Vegas you can be anyone. You can be a paragon of virtue who protects the innocent and upholds justice. You can be a pragmatic gunslinger who lives day by day and gives people what they deserve. Or you can be a sadistic killer, the type of person to shoot off someone's legs and leave them to bleed out on the hot desert sand just for looking at you the wrong way. And the best part is that the game actually lets you complete quests AND the story in these ways. Nothing is black and white, everything is permitted,

The last thing I'll mention is the DLC. Old World Blues is one of the funniest and wackiest experiences I've had in an rpg. Dead Money gave me feelings I didn't think a game like this could give me. Honest Hearts lets you throw tomahawks and spears at people. Lonesome Road is a journey full of mystery and wonder while also bringing intense action packed sequences. I don't think Bethesda will ever be able to top the DLC of this game again.

TL;DR Obsidian needs to make another Bethesda game because this one is a MASTERPIECE. 11/10 Would patrol the Mojave and wish for a nuclear winter again.

This game is amazing. I got it in a humble bundle and ignored it for a while until I saw it in my library and thought, "Hey, why not try it out while I redownload Fallout 4?"

Boy am I glad I did. You go from room to room on different levels killing undead in all sorts of different ways. You can get up close and personal with knives and hammers or throw them at your enemies before you get shot. You can travel through toilet pipes onto enemies who are minding their "business" and blow them up spectacularly. Or you can just go in with the good old fashioned revolver and blow off their heads with satisfying gunplay. And on top of all that, the story is interesting.

If there's one word I would use to describe this game it's "Satisfying".
10/10

I really liked Undertale, not for the combat, or the art, or even the story.
I liked it because it kept throwing stuff at me that I didn't expect. At first glance people see it as a retro-style rpg, with somewhat boring combat, but as you get further and further into the game you notice that it really starts to stretch those rules, until it consistently throws them out the window. By the end of the game you don't know what to expect, because this isn't a standard rpg like it seems at first. It understands that the player is, in fact, a player, and uses that fact so well by changing the rules and and doing things that only a video game could possibly do. I can't really say much more without spoiling it, but once you get past the boring combat and get further into the game, you start to appreciate it more and more.

tl;dr Play the game once all the way through to understand why there's so much hype about it. It's more about how the game uses the fact that its a game to its advantage, rather than just following the same old boring jrpg rules that most retro games do these days.