Recent reviews by JamesR

I have repeatedly tried to give Kingdom Come the time I think it needs to truly shine, but I find the whole experience so incredibly tedious. I could probably forgive the glacial pace if it felt like the moment-to-moment gameplay was worth it, but it's only ever frustrating.

Based on the consensus shared by others, the game will eventually reward you if you patiently grind out your skills with trainers and focus on improving yourself. But it seems to me that instead of spending hours on end sparring with trainers, a completely banal chore, you would expect I could instead improve my character by exploring the world and defeating bandits.

Not so. The combat masquerades as skill based but it is in fact hugely weighted in favour of skill/level experience. I would say 75% of your combat capability is derived by stats you have to grind, the rest covered by your actual competency and equipment. You will consistently be 2-3 hit killed for missing a single perfect parry window against AIs that seem to have infinite stamina and full sets of kevlar body armour, even as starving bandits living in the woods.

Honestly, I do think there is a diamond here. It's big, it's bold, it's surprisingly funny... But it fails on the most basic bar: It's not really fun to play. If you have 100+ hours to kill and the patience of a saint, give it a go. Otherwise I'd recommend something that respects your time more.

Having played a few hours of the single player, I can see why people would enjoy this in multiplayer but it really doesn't stand out to me as anything special.

It's very slow and there seems to be no motivation to be faster, because going fast is just increasing the risk to yourself and your team. The AI enemies are pretty brain dead and will happily wait for you to slowly and meticulously make your way to them in an a nearby room while you cut down all their friends standing out of cover in the lobby.

The single player experience is a gruelling and largely un-fun experience, sometimes resulting in you retracing every step of the map to find one random cowering civilian in a bathroom stall on a mission you otherwise completed 10 minutes ago.

The user interface, especially the interactions around the tablet and the roster screens are just baffling on a K+B setup. I suspect they have been designed and tuned to work well with controllers, but unassigning a squad mate is usually achieved by randomly stabbing at the UI until it does what you ask.

Is this the game for people who want a slow and methodical shooter akin to the original Rainbow Six games? Sure, I can see it. Would I rather be playing a remake of Rainbow Six: Vegas? 100% Yes.

It turns out I don't really want a simulator, I want better R6: Siege PvE modes. I suppose that's on me.

Veilguard may not be a CRPG, but it's great for what it is: An Action RPG with solid combat, a tight if pretty pulpy narrative and good pacing.

It's been a while since I played anything RPG adjacent that felt like it respected your time - No inventory tetris, or reagent combo-farming here. Just a game that goes from beat-to-beat, with just enough build variety and itemisation to tailor your character to your playstyle without falling into any newbie traps.

Enjoyed the first 8 hours, already found two NPCs I think are great as the backbone of my party, and looking forward to the rest.

I never thought I needed a Half Life inspired survival game, with the sense of humour of Gary's mod and a healthy dose of surrealist SCP horror... But Abiotic Factor proved me wrong.

I played it solo and found the entire experience a joy. Progress was steady throughout, and it transitions seemlessly from exploration, to combat and the occasional dose of horror to keep you on your toes.

The first few hours are a bit bumpy, and I'd say the game doesn't do a great job of helping you learn what to do in those early hours. But once you find your feet, I think what you'll find is one of the most interesting games in the survival space on the market today.

Solo start to finish of the content available today was about 45~ hours. Probably another 10-15 if I wanted to continue getting the best equipment and finding all the secrets. I'd be fascinated to see what this was like in a multiplayer environment.

This is pretty much the best-in-class factory builder out of the box, and the reviews speak for themselves. So rather than adding to the chorus of praise I want to complain about a few things that always taint my experience;

I wish the transition into the late game didn't involve quite so much fluid management - I've had to tear down and rebuild entire factories on more than one occasion because the pipes don't want to pipe. Moving up to volume aluminum processing is such a hassle that it kills any momentum I have every time. Pipes just don't work predictably, consistently or intuitively and I honestly don't know what the added headaches are really doing to improve gameplay. A toggle that switches fluids to just behave like gases in pipes would be a godsend.

I also wish you weren't quite so dependent on alternate recipes to get any semblance of balance and efficiency in factories for quite important materials. (Looking at you turbofuel...). This leads to hard drives being hugely important to acquire, only to have the lottery draw for recipes never give you what you need. Frustrating more often than it is rewarding.

And my last complaint: There is an objective lack of good ways to traverse distances even in the mid-late game. Most of the vehicles are largely useless because the terrain is constantly in the way. So you pretty much have to build road networks... But if you're doing that you might as well just build hyper-tube / rail networks instead. Or, as always, build hypertube cannons. At this point they should just be a mid-game craftable structure that can be fine tuned for velocity and direction.

I've only clocked 4 hours but I'm honestly pretty surprised and disappointed at how Stalker 2 plays. For a game in the UE5 engine it plays remarkably badly. Everything from the gunplay and movement, to the AI and mission design feels like they're from a game from the early 2000s.

Most of the emergent management aspects are solved by one single thing: Cash. Weapon durability low? Cash. Running low on med packs? Cash. Need to upgrade your favourite weapon? Cash. Short on cash? Dump your 500 sausages into the nearest infinite cash vendor.

The itemisation is pretty basic. Where you think a modular weapon building + management system would be - That you fill out as you collect rare weapon parts - Realistically there is little more than a menu that you unlock options in - Then upgrade again with cash. The majority of weapons you find are broken, and short of desperately wanting to repair it for yourself, you just dump the ammo out of the gun and throw it on the floor.

You would assume there would be some aspect of salvaging... But there is none to be found.

I understand Stalker has always existed on the more difficult and frustrating side of design, not particularly interested in being fair or kind to the player, but I feel like there's little if any reward for evolving past those initial frustrations. You will save, load and redo the same sections over and over again - Not because you necessarily did anything wrong, but because some aspect of the design failed you.

AIs being crack shots with broken guns at 300 meters? Consistent. AIs posting grenades through a letter box half a click away? Every time. Well equipped enemies dropping 1x bandage and 6x rounds of ammo when you kill them? Persistent.

Honestly Stalker 2 feels like it spent both too long and not long enough in development, and to sum it up: It's needlessly frustrating, rarely rewarding and probably the worst-playing game I've ever seen in UE5.

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Short follow-up since I have now submitted it for a refund, but have uninstalled regardless of the outcome of that request.

I have a relatively mid gaming PC setup but try as I might I can not get this game to run with any semblance of stability once you leave the starter zone and head into the rest of the game. Downrezzing 75% with everything set to Medium and DLSS set to max performance did not even manage 60 without constant hitches, frame-drops and the occasional 20 second lock.

If you aren't having these issues or you have a top 5% rig then will likely have a better time than me - But tools like DLSS, framegen, etc. are there to make these games functional and accessible to a wider range of systems. The performance just isn't there for me, and it's not even particularly close.

This, combined with what I wrote above, and numerous other gripes I have with this game just make it not really worth the time today.

Honestly, this is the best deck-builder since Slay the Spire. I think I might even prefer it to StS...

if you like survival games but you wish they had a stronger narrative, then Green Hell might just be the game for you. It's tough, unforgiving and not interested in holding your hand... But what seems like A gruelling uphill battle for survival does slowly level out as you play.

The narrative is light but hits well. There's secrets abound and multiple endings available. There's even additional game modes if you still haven't gotten enough Green Hell: One pure survival experience and one lighter narrative experience (designed for longer term play).

The only problem I have with Green Hell may well be a deal breaker for most: Base building is a pretty pointless exercise and it takes an age to build even a relatively humble shack. You never really need a base and you will farm for in-game weeks to build something you're happy with. For a game with so many cool and interesting building tools, it's a shame they don't really serve a purpose.

With all that said, I had a great time playing Green Hell. I look forward to coming back to the Tales of Amazonia game I started in the future.

One of the best Terraria/Stardew adjacent games on the market that sees you going from humble beginnings in cramped cave systems to digging out space for huge compounds and transport networks as you traverse the map looking for the next boss arena.

Progression is pretty constant, there's a decent amount of gear and build variety, and even after 50~ odd hours there's entire biomes (released later) to explore and conquer.

Challenging but not difficult and manages to keep the relatively chill vibe alive until you begin exploring those frontiers. Recommended for a small group, 2-5 people, perfect fine solo.

A simple, relatively relaxing, romp around a 2D galaxy with a pretty clean if not particularly ground breaking sci-fi narrative to tie it all together.

My main criticism is a simple one: The entire experience feels slow. Travelling is slow, your next crew upgrade is slow, ship upgrades are slow. The main barrier to progress is just time, and aimlessly floating around space trying to farm up enough materials to progress in a difficult combat encounter isn't particularly satisfying.

That said, I enjoyed the experience once I accepted the slow pace of the game and used the substantial amount of downtime to do other things on a second screen.

The Good

- Easy and relaxing core gameplay
- Some interesting narrative beats in the exploration text
- Ship building supports a number of play-styles
- The ship combat feels great (I played as a Missile-frigate x Laser Brawler)

The Middling

- Resources always felt constrained
- Trading is honestly just a nuisance as implemented
- The base-travel speed makes the game feel sluggish
- Void-travel (between systems) could be 400% faster and respect your time better

The Bad

- You are regularly left without any breadcrumbs to follow during the main story
- Quests often forget to include important information in the quest log
- "Research Points" soft-lock you into your ship-build options
- Crew XP feels like a pretty pointless mechanic overall
- RNG on planet events means you may miss one-off narrative beats 'forever'
- Everything takes far too long to do