Recent reviews by Game Dad

Until the game gets a desperately needed performance patch, it is not worth buying.

Atomfall is a good time. More STALKER than Fallout in terms of its combat and world, and a fairly bite-sized length in comparison to both. The ending just kinda fizzles out, but the journey there is a great time.

It's a rare achievement to make a game that's a great time, but the game itself desperately does not want you to play it.

Systemic and fundamental problems in multiplayer and singleplayer that are unlikely to be patched out. In a day and age with crossplay and hop in hop out multiplayer the fundamental problems are just inexcusable. This isn't even dated design principles, it's just alien to the concept of good user experience design.

If you have the patience to look past the issues (or intend to just play solo) it's a damn good time. But I cannot recommend it on principle when everything surrounding that enjoyment is tedious and frustrating.

UPDATED REVIEW:
Rolled credits, and my review stands. But with a caveat: Avowed hits so much harder if you play Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire first, and in many ways I think they uplift the game narratively from a 7/10 to a 9/10.

I could imagine a lot of people not really 'getting' the narrative that Avowed tells or why it matters so much in the world of Pillars, because while the game does what it can to set the stakes and inform you of the world, it exists so close to the narrative of its universe that they are very nearly required reading. Without them, it's a fantastic game with an interesting story. But with them, the story hits ten times harder.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Avowed isn't Skyrim, but you can get a good sense of if you would enjoy it by a comparison to it.

Skyrim is a game that you can live in. You can camp out, rely on food and water for survival. It's a sandbox where you make your own story, because the existing story isn't all that interesting. The fact that combat feels a bit floaty doesn't matter because it's just nice to exist in the world.

By comparison, Avowed has areas that you need to narratively progress through in order to move to the next place. It has a story that it wants to tell, rather than a sandbox you can go and play in. What it lacks in a giant sandbox it makes up for with fantastic combat that feels punchy, especially in melee.

Avowed isn't going to experience Skyrim levels of success, but I really love it for the fact that it's a tight game. It's not giant and expansive, it's tight and focused. The story is engaging (especially as a person who loved Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire), the combat is great fun, and the voice acting is wonderful. Overall I've really loved my time in Avowed so far and I can strongly recommend it to others.

Suzerain has the potential to be a great game, but the level of frustration I've felt playing it, I simply cannot recommend it. Good narrative games do not leave you wondering why things ended out the way they did.

I have tried over and over again to like Suzerain. But as much text as the game throws at you, it tells you very little to help you understand the ramifications of your decisions or why events are taking place. I have done everything to keep my nation peaceful just to end up at war in the end. I have chosen to run a planned economy and not privatise any of our services, just to be told that I failed and ran a mixed economy. The game throws events at you and possibilities without giving you a timeline to understand what you may need to consider in future.

You'll see my hours dedicated to the game, but this is just repeated playthroughs trying to understand what I was doing wrong, to fix things I felt must have been mistakes I made in individual turns. But it takes hours upon hours to see things go wrong, and a single decision can be the reason that everything broke down. I love the idea of a political game where your decisions matter, but how do you know your decisions matter if the game does not explain to you why it ended up the way it ended up?

This is all made all the more frustrating by the overly verbose writing and often repeating dialogue options where you find yourself having to repeatedly state your decision before the game will move on. And then on the flip side, critical decisions that can send your country to its doom are skipped over. It's absolutely frustratingly inconsistent.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is beautiful and wonderful, but also a very different game from its precursor. If you enjoyed the first game, you will love the second. It carries the DNA of the first through and through, expanding on mechanics but at the cost of the narrative in its final moments.

The ending lacks the truly personal touch and sense of how your decisions created the outcome that the first carried with it. Instead, the ending of the second feels largely pre-ordained, and while it had me and my partner in tears it felt like a frustrating low blow; the narrative equivalent of kicking a puppy to elicit a response. But despite that, it did not tarnish the journey.

Survival Crafting is one of those genres that is absolutely flooded with titles, it's hard to stand out. But then comes along Abiotic Factor, which does for survival crafting what Baldurs Gate 3 did for classic RPG's. It refines the formula and expands upon it in a world that is presented with genuine love and care to the numerous game and cultural influences that have inspired it. I cannot recommend it enough, especially to play with friends.

Pacific Drive is such an atmospheric experience. When I started playing, I had a bit of anxiety that it was going to be a horror game, especially with the tourists popping up behind you Weeping Angel style. But just as I was getting settled in and accepting it was just spooky, not scary, I go to a new zone with new weird threats and find myself all anxious all over again. Meanwhile the game undercuts its horror with quirky anomaly names and writing, and it just makes for such a wonderful experience.

The writing is great, and the characters are all incredibly likeable. The fact that you are canonically becoming more obsessed with your car while also making it our lifeline in a hostile environment is just such a masterstroke of design and writing. I'm happy to be brainwashed by this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ station wagon.

Others have said that it gets old after a while and that's a fair criticism, but the new zones mix things up and progression adds enough that I can see this being a game I come back to for a long time to come.

If you enjoy survival games like Raft and want a spooky experience without the horror jumpscares, Pacific Drive is a great game.

Age of Wonders 4 is a great game if you play it singleplayer, but the multiplayer at present is completely broken and unplayable. I cannot recommend it.

I really want to like Raft, but there's a lot of things the game does that just frustrate and make no sense. The game works on weird logic and breaks its own rules often. Why does a bird take so many arrows to kill? Why are logs and large trees unable to be chopped down? Why is the bucket only for milk? The experience just ends out being a mess where you can often just feel like you fell into a trap for not playing exactly the way the game intends.