Recent reviews by Naroon

Mostly a campaign/co-op player, but this collection has an insane value with so many fun campaigns on offer here. Most are fine technically, but Halo 2 has a really bad de-sync issue in co-op which makes the game randomly either disconnect players from each other, or outright crash the game. The one level in H2 with the long-ass bridge and endless tunnels was impossible to finish in co-op because we just kept crashing out every single attempt. I googled it and many others had the same issue and the same level was apparently much more crash-prone than others. Supposedly, locking your refresh rate to a fixed number and ensuring that both players are at the same rate can help fix this, but I didn't have any luck.

Aside from that, the games are a lot of fun and they feel great at 100+ fps with keyboard + mouse controls. Well worth the coin even though sadly support has officially ended and the remaining issues in the collection won't be fixed.

Yeah, this version of the game not only functions without any issues on Win 10 in 2024, but it also has all of the content that was originally ever released in the PC port. And the community servers still exist in various forms for you to play. There is zero reason whatsoever to grab the 2024 "Remastered Collection".

As usual, if you somehow do encounter issues, or just want to know about any potential issues ahead of time, just consult pcgamingwiki and look at this game's page there.

I honestly have no idea how this game ever got the reputation for being an "amazing rally sim" or even a good game. As of 3/13/2024 I have played all of the "mainline" DiRT games with the exception of Dirt 5, because it looks and seems like a complete regression of the DiRT concept in terms of actual game design (how the hell do you make a rally game WITH NO POINT-TO-POINT RALLYING????) -- so that means DiRT 1, 2, 3, 4, Rally 1.0, and this. I know technically EA WRC is the 'next' entry but I don't have it atm so whatever.

This game's physics are incongruent, inconsistent, and generally nonsensical. Grip varies wildly from stage to stage in an unnatural way, but overall due to the game's piss-poor force feedback, both on a gamepad and on wheel setups, and general tire modeling (especially on tarmac), you always just feel like you're driving on soap, with soap tires, and the ride never seems to bite in like it should. Car tuning can sometimes save this (and some of the default setups are just outright bad) but it's an issue with Codies' physics simulation and some of these issues were already present in DR1. Beam.NG destroys this game in this regard, the over-rated-despite-being-good Richard Burns Rally does as well, and even some of the WRC games felt better and more predictable and consistent than this.

The visuals are nice, and the career is sometimes fun, but it gets ruined by the fact that the game is always-online for some dumbass reason, so you can be in the middle of an event or just finish one and have your progress get rendered null and void just because of Codies'/EA's servers taking a dump out of nowhere. If it weren't for THIS issue I would probably still have kept this game installed, but it's a deal-breaker more than the weird physics are. There is no justifiable, practical, cogent reason for this type of game to be forced always-online just to play it properly, or at all, yet it's not only there, but can ruin your actual rally events and ability to post times... Unbelievable...

Also a massive amount of the game's actual content is DLC, and there's a crapload of it, so that sucks. If you MUST get this game, use a site like fanatical dot com or some other keyseller site to get the GOTY edition for cheap.

Honestly I would suggest even the very first DiRT entry over this one, it's legitimately still a good game and has a boatload of content, but actually finding a copy is the tricky part. Shame it got delisted. Dirt 2 & 3 are both great and a bit easier to find, 4 is very divisive and justifiably so but can be fun to mess around with if you can find it for dirt cheap, and Rally 1 is a glorified beta with hardly any actual content and its own fair share of busted physics glitches.

Man.

I really wanted to like this game, but the devs just could never get it together when it came to the Mirror's Edge concept. The first game is too short, suffers from inconsistent level and game design that frequently strips away all of the player's momentum which kills the flow of the game, and also was prone to random crashing (PC) and physics bugs (all platforms.) So then, let's get into ME: Catalyst.

The sense of speed and momentum is certainly much improved, which is welcome, and now the game world is a persistent 'open-world' type map which is really just a moderately-sized string of rooftops and occasional interiors with an emphasis on verticality. Despite this, the game still suffers from gameplay issues that sour the experience and ultimately eventually killed any desire I had to continue on with the game after hitting the 11 hour mark. Most of that time was spent doing optional side missions, although the side missions have a laughably disproportionate and badly-executed difficulty spike compared to the main missions. Lots of them are just outright badly designed 'courses' to begin with, but some pretty much require you to have certain abilities which are locked behind main game progression.

Oh yeah, let's talk about those abilities. They are handled terribly because literally over half of them are just basic moves that Faith started with in the original game. Being able to roll after a high drop to break your fall and maintain momentum? Gotta unlock it. Being able to run up a wall and turn 180 to jump to another area? Unlock it. Tucking your legs in the air? Unlock it. Faith's basic 3-hit melee combo? Unlock it. It's absurd and it's super blatant how most of the abilities are just filler because some idiot on the design team decided the game just needed a skill tree because all the other AAA games were doing it. The game also suffers from the same type of bad clipping/collision detection issues which will make Faith grab the wrong thing, or not grab anything at all, or just bounces you off a wall so you fall to your death, etc. Just mechanically kinda sloppy.

The story is almost impossible to follow because seemingly over half of it isn't in the game -- it's one of those games where most of the plot is actually in a graphic novel they released, so without you reading that, you're just gonna be completely at a loss as to who the hell they're talking about because a lot of events and characters legit never actually get explained or even introduced in the actual game. Faith also has a different personality from the first game and comes off less sweet, righteous, and genuine and more like an aloof ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ instead.

After a little over 11 hours, I just couldn't take it anymore. The art direction is beautiful, and the soundtrack is really nice, just like the first game... But also just like the first game, this game needed a more cohesive development cycle because it's clear they weren't really firing off on all cylinders with this game, or maybe they just can't really handle this concept properly. Oh well.

Actually one of the worst shooters I've ever played, and I've been playing them since the 90s. Somehow, this game manages to do literally nothing better than its predecessor, perhaps besides art direction variety.

First off, playing on Normal difficulty is a joke, as the game is so easy it feels like you're playing a tech demo rather than a finished product. On Normal, you take ages to die, never really have to use medkits as a result rendering them useless, and every firefight is a bore because you're never threatened and the enemy AI exists in theory only. So that means Hard mode is basically the only actual difficulty level in the game (there's nothing higher unlike in the original.)

Whereas Normal was too easy (I wonder what Easy mode is like. Do they just straight up disable the player's ability to take damage??), Hard mode feels like the game is about to collapse upon its own weight at any given second. Nothing is consistent or congruent under Hard mode. They may as well have named "Hard" difficulty, "Pandora's Box" difficulty instead, because it would at least make the gameplay's disjointedness and outright randomness make some modicum of sense.

Okay, maybe I should get to explaining what the hell I even mean... Well, there's not a whole lot of gun variety, or at least not of the 7 hours I played, as I didn't finish the game out of sheer frustration/boredom. Gun damage seems to be completely random, and that degree of randomness varies from gun to gun. My favorite example of this is the shotgun: sometimes I can shoot, every pellet will collide with the target from a close distance, and then the target will proceed to look mildly annoyed, dust himself off, and then do a reverse backflip over the nearest piece of cover whilst complaining that "nearly the whole damn squad's dead!" even though he's got five buddies left and I haven't actually killed anyone yet. OR, I'll fire one shot, and that shot will immediately erase the enemy from reality, along with every trace of anything or anyone he'd ever loved. I'm not exaggerating, the amount of times I've shot people with this thing and asked "WHERE DID THEY EVEN GO" is kinda high. And as hilariously awesome as it sounds, I wish it DID THAT EVERY TIME I FIRED IT, AND NOT JUST 15 OR 20% OF THE TIME.

Guns just don't feel good to shoot, the sounds mostly suck, there is no satisfying audiovisual element whatsoever to accompany or acknowledge successful round hits, and most of them feel weak as ♥♥♥♥ despite the enemy being able to cross-map you with them from across the universe. Audio-mixing in general is terrible, the overall master volume is still whisper-quiet even at max, yet you will have your ears blown out every time any of the stupid "Alma is screwing with you" bits happen, which is approx every 40 seconds, and for some reason footsteps are basically nonexistent so you can hardly ever hear where anyone or anything is coming from.

There is terrible mouse acceleration, and even after installing a mod that ostensibly was meant to fix it, it was still there, and still awful. Even with maxed in-game look sensitivity, the lookspeed is still not great and you'd need to modify your mouse DPI to get better results (best result is to never play the game.) You can't use Mouse 4 or Mouse 5 for anything either, which immediately deducts 5 points from the game's score.

And the enemy AI is just... I don't even know what to say. If you ever played the original game and then play this, you can CLEARLY tell that the dev team knew they couldn't replicate that AI, so just opted to make the AI spaz all over the room/area at light speed and then either get stuck on map geometry and further spaz out/break, or just blindly go turbo-aggro on you and just charge you relentlessly hoping to overwhelm your senses and make you erroneously believe the AI is actually functional, or good (spoiler: they aren't, they suck, much like everything else in the game)

The graphics are... okay, I guess... In a lot of ways various textures and geometric detail is somehow less refined than its predecessor, and this game didn't quite 'get me' atmospherically like F1 did, either. And player movement is more restricted than the first game somehow and also feels less responsive and has less options (you can no longer lean... I can't even lazily say this is consolization, because FEAR 1 literally got ported to PS3 and 360 WITH THE LEAN FULLY INTACT!)

Despite being an FPS, a lot of the animations are un-cancellable so you can legit get killed in an instant while reloading or even crouching, because for example, the crouch -- instead of being either an incredibly quick yet smooth transition, or instant, it instead just has a really weird second-long pause AFTER you hit the crouch key before it actually crouches you. And for some reason, the transition from crouch to standing is nigh-instant. Who the hell came up with this crap? It feels TERRIBLE. And most of the reload animations are the most infuriatingly glacial reloads I've seen in any game. It's atrocious.

Last thing I'll dunk on are the characters and story. Once again, ALL terrible. You thought Point Man's arc was interesting and wanted more of it? Screw you and screw that, instead here's some new loser named Beckett, along with his generic motley crue of oFf-KiLtEr archetypal military losers, who predictably all get introduced and then slowly killed-off one-by-one in increasingly boring ways. As you trawl through the insidiously linear levels, you sometimes will come across "intel documents" which are just the most annoyingly boring attempts at idle world/lorebuilding I've ever seen. These docs literally are a waste of time and not a single one I picked up had anything remotely interesting to say. The closest was just a garbage cheeky reference to Paxton Fettel from the first game.

Honestly, this game is not worth playing at all and even though I only spent like $0.50 on this game, that was still too much and the publisher should probably pay me for the emotional distress this game caused me. Hard skip.

Red Dead Online. All I ever heard was how the game got abandoned by C*, and that's true, but this is my first time playing a Red Dead game and I somehow got cracked out on this game and have already had multiple days where I basically did nothing but play this damned game lol.


* legitimately gorgeous visuals -- art direction, lighting, it's just a treat to look at
* combat is tight, brutal, and kinda addicting
* gameplay loop is hella addicting, with surprising amounts of depth and variety
* excellent sound design, although spatial audio is fairly hit-or-miss which is unfortunate as several game mechanics rely on it
* incredible immersion level, very easy to get sucked into the experience from the sheer level of detail
* decent performance on pc; my specs are: GTX 1080 (non-ti), i5-11600k, 32gb DDR4 RAM, installed on 1TB SSD, and there are a wealth of customization options for the graphics and performance, and the AMD FSR2 is very well implemented as I hardly ever dip below 60fps at 1080p native res, with very difficult-to-perceive image quality loss, what little there is. In other words, excellent


* progression is slow and brutal by design, this isn't inherently bad but the game does the usual thing that devs do where they don't really explain anything at all, despite there being an optional 30-ish minute long tutorial that helps to ease you into the world. Expect to regularly consult online guides to learn how things actually work, or at least optimally.
* enemy AI suffers from the same Terminator-on-crack tendencies that plagued GTAO, where they can suddenly get god accuracy and insta-melt you from across the galaxy. I've legit even seen multiple cases where an enemy fully-auto sprayed his entire non-existent magazine at me, from his ♥♥♥♥♥♥ BOLT-ACTION RIFLE. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ had to have fired 20 rounds at me, minimum, So that's proof a lot of the jank code was copy-pasted for the AI lol.
* controls suffer from the usual C* jank where things are either badly/weirdly mapped or just super unresponsive to user inputs. Character movement somehow feels more responsive than GTA V, yet at the same time your character/horse will hastily climb/jump things when you don't want it to happen, often times just from a single flick of the stick or key press. Also, the PC keyboard/mouse controls are ATROCIOUS and I have no idea how, because GTA V/Online was generally very well mapped and even customizeable. Definitely use a gamepad if you can. The UI in general is badly designed and has a lot of unnecessary bloat, and oftentimes it's easy to get lost navigating the various menu options trying to find what you're looking for.

Aside from some other tiny issues, that's about it. Overall I really like the game and think it's certainly worth playing if you're into cowboy stuff or really love Rockstar I guess. I haven't played much SP and I don't care if that upsets peeps like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ how much do you really need your opinions validated hmm???? (joking, but not really)

edit 6/21/2023: There are lots of people reporting random and frequent game crashes, so let me add my 2 cents on that. I built this rig 3 years ago and never had a blue screen until I played this game. The game straight up insta-crashed my whole PC that time and it honestly made me think about uninstalling the game because I have zero tolerance or patience for code that is THAT bad. Many others report similar, and apparently random crashing (not necessarily always BSODs) and some can't even get the game to boot. Vast majority of those peeps also say R* support is useless (they generally are, this is well known) and they don't get refunds from either R* or Steam from it.

This game honestly isn't nearly good enough for me to try to defend this, so I won't. I only write reviews to try to help people spend their money wisely so I have zero emotional attachment to the game like many do.

A legitimately fun co-op game that has a decent amount of content and replay value. When the game first launched there was a content drought and not much incentive to keep playing the game, but the devs keep releasing new content and patching the game so at least the dev support is there, and as such the game is in a much better state than it was at launch. Also has cross-platform co-op, so that's nice. Just be wary about the online de-sync glitch which randomly will disconnect players from the host.

*Rocket Explosion*

HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA HUA

Honestly not a bad game if you can tolerate Ubisoft's cancerous launcher, and some say the game crashes often but I never experienced that (also no idea why my play time says 39 minutes as I've played a ♥♥♥♥ load of Uno lol) but it's also not the best incarnation of Uno. Still, better than nothing I guess and isn't an abomination so I guess thumbs up?

This game is still fun even after all these years. People do still play, and the community in my experience is hella chill and generally always down to help lower-level players out or even attempt some of the game's more nutty optional challenges/hidden secrets. If you're itching for a fun co-op game then this is a very solid option. It's also nice that there's not a lot of extra paid DLC, unlike the sequel which was a monetization hellscape.