Recent reviews by googleman81

This game is very mid.

There's aspects that are amazing, like the visuals at times, the audio, when Naoes moves work and she doesn't get stuck on the wrong ledge like Altair and then there's the stuff that's been in all the AC games since, I don't know, forever.

This game features underbrush that is a pain to run through and way too many deer even for a period where roadkill wasn't a thing yet, no fish in the water though, except for a couple random manta rays off some cast, speak of overfishing, and on the second day of play on GFN it's plagued with bugs and janky mechanics, like many Ubisoft titles, DLSS frame generation isn't always available when the game launches and that means 50~ fps instead of 90.
The first day the framerate limiter that's turned off took it way to literal and ran the game at 600ish fps at times causing very sped up moments, but Naoes move set felt smooth and it was good fun. Today is very much plagued by jank, currently in a boss battle that is clearly meant to be completed by Yasuke, but once you pick Naoe there's no switching back and instead of staying there and taking care of the adds like would make sense based on the cutscene seconds earlier, he just disappears, doesn't even use a smoke bomb, just teleports himself out and leaves you to clean up the mess.

Apart from the fact that I'm not really into cars and not into murdering sex workers to get your money back either, I have to say Rockstar releases one title every now and then and they polish that stuff.
Ubisoft did another kinda cool, with many old ideas, some new, forcibly introduced ones, many kinda functioning systems, a lot of superfluous bulk and jank. The jank is what gets me.

Now, I know, I could just go into the gameplay settings and turn on the "assassination guaranteed" check box, which means you actually know the folks die from getting an 8 inch blade stabbed into their neck, like "realism", or whatever, but what's the point.

Fix your poop, Ubisoft, polish that rubber turd.

This game is very good. Chapter 4 has a lot of bugs though.

So, I'm in my 40's and there's an option to turn off voice chat, which is great.
But there's still so much randomness and uneven skill distribution in play, plus what must be developer hacks for monetization purposes since there's anti cheat, so that's clearly not it...
People will just park themselves in a corner, try a new character every death, ignore pretty essential combos and so on.
My Moon Knight dude doesn't kill jack poop even with the ankh and his heavier triple throw, while I'm on a killing spree with the Punisher, so my aim clearly isn't that off and on and on.
The art style, sound and UI are all great, but the overall feel of the game is pretty sluggish, kinda slow, slower than Fortnite even, from what I remember from my one hour playing it in 2018.
Quite certainly enjoyment of this product is drastically heightened if you manage to get a consistent group and apply teamwork, but that's just not happening in 70% of the time here, plus there's like only 3 skins per character and I wanted to buy something that would help me get less developer damage nerfs during matches, but oh well.
At least I can still sink money into Snap, y'all remember Snap, right?

If you purchase this game for the 12 hour campaign and just love Warhammer 40K and think it's worth it, go ahead.

But if you, like me, skip the campaign because you don't care about the blue boys and go straight into coop, where the meat of this title supposedly is, you'll experience a ton of stuff anyone with a little self esteem would say they didn't sign up for.

This title, like Darktide, is technologically underbaked in terms of the systems that are put in place to enable coop and it also let's people be ♥♥♥♥♥ on the internet and guess what, people love being ♥♥♥♥♥ on the internet.

The "road map" is also completely laughable, one new mission and an armor set that isn't Ultramarine inspired at some point.

Could go into why the multi melta is the only viable option on higher difficulties and prove me wrong and all that, but will call it a day for now.

Got duped again, Cunningham.

As a preface, I've just recently bought the Imperial edition of this on sale, after playing it for a good 50ish hours on Gamepass.
The core mechanics of the game are solid and the overall quality of the visuals, assets and lighting are pretty nice, sound is generally good, the music can get overwhelming and more often than not you'll get surprised by a horde that just spawned in behind you and tippy toed into stabbing range without making any noticeable sound, so there's room for improvement in that department.
Economy and player interactions is what drags this one down for me personally, while this is sort of a looter shooter, the loot only comes in resource form to be utilized for crafting, so no picking up of an exalted chainsword with the seal of terra or anything and often people don't prioritize picking up resources, so you'll end up having to grind to upgrade a weapon you'll replace soon anyway in many cases and upon reaching level cap 30, it all becomes a complete min/maxing/theory crafting exercise with no added gameplay variety.
Only difference between difficulty levels is amount of mobs spawned and perceptively how much damage the player takes, so you'll run through the same passage for the 50th time, but instead of two zombie dudes that die from looking at them the wrong way, you now face a dozen hellhounds and they mean business, it's not the worst approach ever, but some added enemy variety and behavioral complexity would have been preferable to just randomly spawning hordes.

Kids play this game and they're used to Fortnite and Roblox, I guess, so the concept of squad coherence, cooperation and valuing other people's time is sort of foreign vocabulary to them sometimes, it's not as bad as Breachers VR in terms of general levels of knuckle headed imbecility, but can be detriment to the overall sense of fun and accomplishment of any given session, when you have to stand in the extraction raptor vehicle for a good 2 minutes while some random ogryn kid just stands in a passage way and hits the same button for funsies, not to mention some "hackers" messing with the connection or trying to install random crap onto your device out of maleficence, get through puberty and then come back, if this is still around by then or maybe invest in crypto, I dunno, I guess there must be some kind of masochist in me for subjecting myself to this while finding so many reasons to do something different with my time, but what are the options right now, bear sex?

Preliminary review, edited version coming up once I've made some more progress.

This game has the potential to become my next Gungeon, it's that good. The amount of content and story including completely nonsensical random fun bits is staggering, the soundtrack, visuals and gameplay are extremely on point. 2 escapes have been successfully completed at this point in time and there's only a sense of tiny dents made in the fabric of Hades. If this keeps up and the game manages to make me try other weapons that aren't the spear, I'll be able to play this all the way into mid November, every day.

10

Extremely satisfying on point twitchy gameplay. Entirely skill based. Unforgiving but not unbeatable. Doom soundtrack. Pink pixels.

10/10

A moody visual masterpiece, with a great atmospheric soundtrack and many whimsical and awe inspiring moments set in a minimalist world that still has room for magic. The subject matter is rather dark and deals with serious issues, which is nicely balanced by the overall level of difficulty and just slightly challenging puzzles. Overall just a beautiful journey that can likely be completed in around 4 hours.

9/10 made be a bit sad.

Overall this is quite the fun experience. It's a metroidvania style game with rogue lite elements that don't really require death, but upon the event the player will be transported to the hub, where all the RPG style upgrades can be added. Initially the game is quite hard and even though the amount of intermittent hordes increases the longer the player stays in certain areas and generally during later periods in the game, it never feels like quite the challenge after a while. The boss battles are layered and difficult, usually resulting in a couple deaths and the necessity to backtrack to the boss room, which sometimes can take a couple minutes. Visuals are pleasing, but the levels are often pretty one tone and the amount of clutter has the possibility to overwhelm. The one real downside in my experience is the fact that most of the great movement upgrades occur very late in the game, thus minimizing the actual playtime and perceived utility greatly. Haven't beaten the final boss yet, but made it to the dark zone, where tons of enemies swarm you, it's intense.

Let's get some Guacamelee with chips.
Generally advertised as metroidvania, the game is quite linear in overall progression and offers little incentive to complete all the side content as it's just a vehicle to have easier boss fights. Where Guacamelee really shines is the art, the puzzle platforming and the dimension switching mechanic. Going from the world of the living to the world of the dead changes every screen the player finds herself in, even if ever so subtly and provides added eye candy to the already pretty fun to look at product.
Mexican history and culture is represented well, even more so considering the developers stem from Canada. Sound is quite good as well, the title melody tends to repeat itself quite a bit, but that is hardly noticeable over all the punching and hopping.
I'd recommend this game to anyone interested in slightly difficult platformers with smart beat em up sequences, the game isn't super hard but it's also not something to just pick up and breeze through casually, but can be completed in under 8 hours. As such, picking it up for 10-15$ seems like a no brainer.

8.5/10 Nachos.