Recent reviews by Madison Beer < Crown Royal >

Saw this game on an RCE (Real Civil Engineer) YouTube video, decided to get it cuz it's $3 - it's quite fun. The ending run is a bit of a grind when you have nothing left to do but save up one currency to do the last step - But the lead up to that is all fun. The upgrades tree is pretty large before you get to the grind part of the game, and you can beat the game in 3-5 hrs depending on what paths you take.
I played through it twice, had fun the second time too, before reviewing it.
I would say I hope there's either a part 2, or maybe a "DLC" to add a new upgrade tree after what's currently the last step... no spoilers, but I could see how it's possible to go that route quite easily... maybe even have you get reset to the beginning of the upgrade tree, but this time it's slightly different etc.

I tried this game again, and I still don't like it. The interface is bad, the graphics are extremely cartoonyj/goofy compared to Civ V, and the fact that the graphics are so "meh" is made even more annoying by the fact that, running it at my native resolution (5120x1440) actually heats up my GPU similarly to an actually-good-looking AAA game... which is ridiculous when you consider what this game looks like.
Yeah, Civilization V is dated, but I much prefer it.
I ended up uninstalling this again, tried to get a refund but Steam won't allow it because of how long ago I bought the game.
0/10, would not recommend, don't care what other people say. Maybe it gets better when you get deeper in to the game, but from what I've seen, it's just... not good, and not worth playing.

This game may be "old" now, but it's one that has held up very well graphically speaking. Revolutionized active companions in games, pretty good story, fun elements throughout the game. I bought it on sale, having never played any games from the Bioshock franchise & I really enjoyed it. Don't want to spoil anything so I won't elaborate further.

Updated review: I feel like it's very important people realize 2K22 is literally pay to win - unless you love grinding & losing a lot starting out until your player gets better. The only way to avoid that is buying VC & upgrading your character as much as the game will let you out of the gate. That makes it much more enjoyable. At the current price I would say it is worth buying (nine dollars and fifty nine cents).

I mostly play MyCareer mode, my char is currently on the Miami Heat in my 3rd season of play after being traded my rookie year because I wasn't getting a starting position/enough minutes on the team that drafted me 9th overall. I have molded the Heat in to a team that's both entertaining to watch when I'm on the bench, be it with fouls or because we're up by 30, as well as being impossible to beat unless I mess around & lose on purpose. My current lineup is myself, Jokic, Zion Williamson, Bam Adebayo, & Jimmy Butler starting, with Tyler Herro, Bol Bol (the big boi!), Chris Paul (still don't understand how he even got here in the middle of the 2021-2022 season) and then some roster filling role players that change regularly.

I run myself at SG, Jokic at Center, Zion at PF, Jimmy at SF & Bam Adebayo at PG - we have had runs where we double the other team's score at half time on a regular basis since this lineup got in town. I am enjoying the game very much now, but that's to be expected when my Char is a 97 overall on a team that's that stacked. I'm looking forward to 3-peating this season as champions, and I'm planning on not signing a new contract & switching teams after my contract expires, see how many different teams I can win Chips on before retiring.

Original Review: Do not buy this game. It's literally pay to win. Unless you're god's gift to computerized basketball, good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck winning without spending money on VC to boost your character for MyCareer out of the gate. I may be new to the game & have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue what I'm doing, but I have a MyPlayer with a 95 rated 3-point shot who is somehow missing 66% of the time despite me timing shots within a slither of the exact line you're supposed to hit.

How anyone can win the College Tournament without spending VC I don't know, I don't even think it's possible. I'm stuck in the Semi-Finals, have tried to play the game about 15 times now, every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time I get ahead & my team either blows the lead when I go to the bench, or my team miraculously starts missing every single shot until the other team catches up & takes the lead. This has happened in half the attempts so far, the other half I start out hot from 3, 3/4 or 4/5 then suddenly none of my shots will go in until the other team gets the lead.

Edit: Finally beat the Semi-Final game through sheer dumb luck I think, again I was up by 8, other team comes back to tie, then it magically let me hit some 3s again and we won.

Explain to me HOW a 95-rated 3 point shooter can go 7/28 after starting 4/5 from 3? Shouldn't be possible right? With this game it is.

Oh, and the PC online PvP scene is literally cheater-riddled ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Don't even bother unless you're going to play with friends only.

Don't buy this game, even on sale, it is NOT worth it, especially on PC.

Not going to go in to great detail because I'm sure plenty of other reviews already have... but:

The game itself is awesome, the graphics are amazing (yes, it does take a beast PC to run maxed out, if you're on older gen hardware, quit crying & upgrade, or turn your settings down, this is literally the Crysis of this generation of hardware, stop crying like it's poorly optimized, wankers) - playing on a 9900K @ 5GHz & an RTX 3090 FTW3 Hybrid, I was able to play with maximum settings (not Ultra, maximum, there's a difference) with Quality DLSS (which actually makes the game look better in 99% of scenes/areas compared to DLSS off, by the way, while also giving you way better frame rate) at 3440 x 1440 & got around 35-60fps, with the FPS being over 45 about 80% of the time. Recently upgraded monitor to a Samsung Odyssey G9, at 5120 x 1440 I had to turn DLSS up another setting to avoid lowering others, but that still looked pretty good.

Story wise, I'm not going to spoil anything, but it is enjoyable, there are a lot of different "paths" you can take, and decisions to be made, I've played through the game twice in two different "orders" with 2 different endings, and it was enjoyable both times.

Things I found disappointing: There are only a few companion characters, which I find pretty unfortunate, and it's really obvious where they cut some features to get the game out without any further delays, but as it is, it's still pretty awesome.
Another disappointing thing is No New Game +, which I would assume will come later as a "free DLC" much like it did with the Witcher 3, so I'm not holding that against the game for now.
I also don't like that you can't get multiple ending achievements on Steam etc from one save game before the "point of no return" to start the ending you choose - making you play through the entire game again just to get an ending achievement is a little ridiculous imo.
There were some bugs, in particular I had on quest that would repeatedly bug out/fail as soon as I got too close to someone, cops would swarm in & the mission would auto fail, but I figured out that standing still until the person you're supposed to follow gets to the door they're going to avoided that bug from happening.
I definitely recommend saving often, just in case you do run in to a big, usually reverting save & "trying again" leads to it not happening twice.

Overall I would give this game very high marks, while it does have some bugs, it was a great way to blow over a month in game... I started playing it about a week after launch, and I have 178 hours... so yeah, I've played it a lot :-D
9/10 will play again eventually. Hopefully between future patches & DLCs to come they put even more content in to the game & fix what issues it still has.

Also, Judy > all, and imo play as Female V, it's an overall better experience from everything I've seen & read.

If you can get this game for less than $10 it's well worth it, and I'm speaking strictly on the single player, since apparently the multiplayer/contracts segment was disabled when Hitman 2 came out.
The single player campaign is enjoyable, I can see it have a good amount of replayability, it basically feels like you're playing a movie for the most part, the cut scenes have a good mix of humor & other elements, the "execution" mode is quite neat, though not perfect (sometimes you can't one-hit people through things that should be penetrable or just plain able to shoot through, for instance railing on a staircase that you can see through).
Overall I would give this a very positive review, I'm almost sad I waited so long to play through it the first time.

I'm sure the game is would be great, if I could play it.
Spent over an hour going over solutions to fix the launching problems it has in Windows 10, nothing I did fixed the issue. I do not recommend buying this game if you're on Windows 10 as it very likely will NOT work at all. Compatibility mode does not fix the launch issues, neither the DirectX9 nor DirectX11 launcher works properly, replacing/making a custom GameProfile file does not fix it, downloading custom .dll's to fix issues with the ones supposedly causing the game to crash on launch didn't fix it either.
Really disappointing because I really wanted to experience this game.

I'm going to try to do this review without ruining the single player, which is the only thing I'll be reviewing for now.

First, a note on performance, both OpenGL & Vulkan in this game are buttery smooth, I don't know if it's my setup or settings I need to fiddle with, but SLi did not work in Vulkan, but worked in OpenGL, getting about 40-60% GPU load across 2 Titan Xp's @ 3440x1440 with 100Hz Adaptive Sync on, flatlined at 97-100FPS (seems to be a bug where the game will act like it's capped at 97 FPS at times... also, any cut scenes run at 60FPS, which is not a big deal, but worthy of note). Keep in mind, my system is not "new", 3930K + 16GB of 2133MHz RAM isn't exactly state of the art, but this game has zero issues at the stated resolution & 100FPS cap.

The game's graphics are amazing, and the gameplay itself is what I call "SUPER INTENSE" for a good lot of the game. The glory-kill mechanics are a bit silly, but awesome at the same time. Unlike Doom 3, there aren't a lot of "jump scares" and this doesn't really double as a horror-genre game. It's a shooter and not much else, which it does pretty darn well. Overall, I would give this game, just based on the single player, a 9/10. I got a good 8-9 hours of gameplay out of it, which for a game that is multi-player focused, is a pretty decent amount of hours in the single player. If you can pick this game up for $15 or less, I highly recommend it!

Some of the boss fights require specific tactics to avoid taking forever (or dying repeatedly), but you can probably figure most of them out without looking up guides or anything. This game is pretty much 50% movement, 50% shooting/weapon choice, if you're not moving a lot, you're probably gonna die a lot.

I feel like if you're reading reviews on this game at this point, you're probably not gonna like it cuz otherwise, you would've bought it already.

I came from previously playing Civ 2 & 4, so this was a big step up in every way in my opinion. Better Graphics, better system, the multiple ways to victory are pretty neat & unique if you choose to enable them.

This is one of those games you can go "Okay I'm only gonna play for a little bit" and you look up after a while & you've been playing for 5 hours. Very easy to lose track of time while playing, if you're in to Strategy games at all.

I won't be buying Civ VI or Beyond Earth, the former because the new Districts system AND the reviews I've seen are not something I think I want to try for myself, and the ladder because it seems to me it's basically Civ V in space. I'm good on that, don't need it. lol

8.5/10, would give higher if you could do a bit more in terms of politics with other nations etc... very addictive, very fun.

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW AHEAD:

Fair warning, if you're at all sensitive about serious-drama type stuff, this game will jerk at your strings REALLY hard.

Basically, you are a normal person who has been given the power to rewind time (to an extent) & retain your knowledge from before the rewind. I won't reveal anymore than that in terms of what the game is about.

The only negatives I have to say about this game are:

1. I'm a graphics-lover, the graphics in this game are not that great. I wish they'd taken the time to do this game in a better looking engine ala Mass Effect: Andromeda or Dragon Age: Inquisition or even CS:GO quality-graphics would've been awesome.

2. Episode 5 (NO SPOILERS HERE) has some of the most annoying crap I've ever had to do in a game in it, and based on what I've read in comments & reviews, I'm not the only one that found those parts very annoying & tedious.

Other than that, & the emotional stuff this game will put you through, it is a great game.

Decisions you make can have pretty wide-reaching consequences, helping someone or not helping someone, talking to someone or not talking to someone, etc. You'll find you want to talk to people sometimes, then rewind to before you did it, and talk to them again, using the information gained previously to edge the conversation in the right direction.

Overall, I would give this game a 9 or 9.5 out of 10 as a review score, the only reasons it doesn't get a 10 are the 2 negatives I listed above.