Recent reviews by Irick

Open source movement shooter, runs like butter on a potato, you can be a cyber-giraffe.

I like Warhammer 40k.
It's a grind-fest co-op shooter set in 40k. The atmosphere is nailed, the gameplay is solid. If you are interested in just grinding out to some excellent tunes while you wail on heretics it is a solid recommendation from me.

A hostile take over occurred.
The wrong people ended up with the keys to the kingdom.
We have moved on to other worlds.

As of writing this review, steam is telling me I've spent 37.5 hours playing.
In game, I've made 8 hours of progress. The reason: Every twenty minutes my game crashes. If i have not mashed a save button in those twenty minutes, I get to replay it.

I'm running a Ryzen 5800X3D with 32 GB of ram and an A770, a machine that by all metrics should be well within the performance range of this game, but what can only be described as gross incompetence on the behalf of Bethesda prevented any optimization for non AMD GPUs. While the Intel ARC series has had the worse time of the bungle, Nvidia users are also having to deal with a poorly optimized experience. The public response to these concerns from Bethesda has been abysmal and dismissive. For a product that they are asking 100$ for, the support has been atrocious. We should demand more from the major publishers. I am demanding more.

I am unable to refund the game because I spent two hours just trying to troubleshoot the initial intel Arc Driver issues. I have no doubt that eventually a combination of game and driver updates will render Starfield a playable experience, but better communication and open access for the big driver teams would have alleviated the issues all together.

Do better. Do what's right for the community you uniquely rely on for the longevity of your titles and not what is best for your brand partners. PC gaming is finally starting to break free of a rut that made it an inaccessible mess and frankly Microsoft is in a great position to profit from it. But we should demand that their monopoly position be checked by, at the bare minimum, playability.

I can not recommend this game in its current state.

This place had potential, but now they have chosen to leave people out in the cold.

VRChat was my first taste of what VR could mean, not as a gimmick but as a medium. To this day there are breathtaking environments made by talented artists all over the platform. I always disagreed with the policy of segmenting off the creative experience behind an arbitrary time sink, but it was there and the community was helpful.

VRchat was a good counterpoint to the narrative Meta wanted to spin, and while I always viewed it as trying to stick people into creator/consumer boxes I saw it as at least more enabling than the big name platforms. That was my relationship with the platform, I was in awe of it honestly up until about a year ago.

I saw the VRChat team go heavy handed on the modding community, and I jumped. Those were my people, curious and helpful. If they didn't have a place here than neither did I. Through the ongoing year, I still did pop back into the application to show my support for friends still doing their thing here. I attended Raindance to present my work in NeosVR, and a few other minor events. It was always a confusing feeling. I love the creative community here. I wanted to support it even though the company's community management made me feel uncomfy. I wanted to want to be here.

Then, earlier this week, the security update dropped. With one day's notice every mod was made obsolete. Years of work from people like me, curious and helpful dorks, was erased. Even though this is no longer my platform, I cried. I knew how they felt. And then I got angry: the hubris on display, the blatant disregard for the health of the community that relied on accessibility mods to interact with their friends. All of the wonder I first felt when I got in VR was taken away from them.

For what? Control. Control over what we are allowed to do in our virtual worlds. The worlds we are building, often for free. The worlds that enrich these platforms. The worlds our friends love. The worlds strangers fall in love in. The worlds that let some people feel a sense of freedom, alleviate body dysphoria and simply feel free to imagine a better future. They want to control those worlds. I won't let that happen.

For a long time, I have refrained from reviewing VRChat. My experience with it was complicated and I could not cleanly express it as positive or negative. But today, I feel it is needed. We need to be emboldened to push back in any way we can against these colonizers of the mind. These irresponsible stewards of our new public spaces. These shortsighted fools who harm first and promise to fix it 'eventually'.

And so: I enjoyed my time here. I can not recommend you do the same. What I can do is encourage you to support your community. Find a new home that will respect you all. Do what you can to make one if one doesn't exist. Don't ceed these spaces, they are too important. If you feel your efforts are better put to reclaiming this place I wish you luck. If you choose to build in my neighborhood I will help you best I can.

Just look out for your friends. Look out for yourself, and keep water nearby.

I think there is something valuable in attempting to preserve these games in an anthology. The improvements made are substantial and I really enjoy being able to play through the history of development that spans this franchise. I hope the format of constant updates of new games to add to the collection drives conservation efforts on the older titles. I would heavily recomend for anyone interested in Halo or the development of the FPS genre.

It's a buggy mess, but I loved it anyway.
The gameplay systems are satisfyingly deep without being overwhelming. The narrative feels fleshed out and there are surprising levels of interock that allude to so many other plots and plans going on in the city.
It's really neat to see this world brought to life. It's really sparked my inspiration for more tabletop sessions :)

This game makes me feel like a more complete human being.
It has me asking hard questions, like if the nature of faith remains relevant in our increasingly secular lives. It has me examining the structures of power that have grown in the presence of dwindling wealth of the middle class. It hs me asking if I would shoot creepy dudes in the arm with a crossbow for my best friend.

All in all, the exploration this game grounds the big questions in life within a beautiful, serene environment that drives home the complexity of melancholy. It offers no simple answers but brings us to find that life can be well lived even in the most disadvantaged situation. Cerebral, beautiful, witty.

:< This lies.
This is not a linux game. It is a windows game.
The interface lag is atrocious under a system far in excess of the recomended system settings. This sort of sloppy porting really should not be tollerated. I really hope that Valve sees this sort of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and starts writing general quality guidelines for the SteamOS/Linux official designation.

This game is qurky in the best of ways. It's got some click action slashing and RTS elements, it's got a great soundtrack. You'll love it, or you'll hate it.