Recent reviews by lornlynx

This game is so so A$$!
Wait, hear me out!
It's a great game, a fantastic one even, but it is so incredibly a$$ to its player, I have rarely seen such a thing, closest I can think of would be IWBTG.
If you never played a Soulslike, I DON'T suggest this game, because it will just needlessly frustrate you. Play Elden Ring or some other game instead, only play it if you have masochistic preferences and want to make a checkmark.

Still here? Okay, let me elaborate then. The game is hard, yes, but that's not my main gripe with it, by far not. I've played my fair share of hard games. But this game, it specifically wants to f*ck you in particular. So many things are designed just to despise you. Enemies placed at points that will simply kill you the first time you walk by, just for the sake of it. Traps and spots to specifically shoot you in the back without any possibility to know before. Deliberate architecture and situations to make you scream "what is that unfair bull$hit??!".

This game toys with your emotions, and rarely in positive ways. It takes your preconceived notions and experiences about games and takes a giant dump onto it just because it can. It deliberately incites frustration and impatience to lead you to make worse decisions. And the patience, oh man, this game just doesn't respect your time. It spits on it and then laughs at you getting mad for it. The concept of an interconnected world where you have to plan your route to efficiently get to the spot that gives you difficulty so you can actually try again is fun at first, but it very quickly becomes a nuisance. You ever felt annoyed when a savepoint wasn't right before a boss or you couldn't just press a single button to retry instead of having to reload manually? Yeah, this game puts that to shame, it doesn't respect you, it doesn't respect your time, or your skills. It becomes a pure try&error at some point, you throw yourself into the grinder headfirst repeatedly getting 10 seconds of interaction for 5 minutes of getting there just to try out if you actually can block that one move and instead getting oneshot by it. It's extremely knowledge-based, the learning curve is very steep and no two enemies behave the same, the game constantly forces you to relearn interactions and adapt. And that's great! But man, at some point I just want to actually try something out, not having to jump through all the hoops I already mastered. 70% of this game is just running. Impatience is pure killer, and this game knows it. It's great when things work out, and you feel just cheated of your time when they don't. And you try again, and again, and again... and it's that what makes it both great and $hit at once.

But there's a lot more issues I have with this game that are less about the way it treats you. A lot of things are very clunky, the game doesn't tell you so many things (wait, I can actually pov aim with the bow???!!) and there are like 20 ways you can irredeemably ♥♥♥♥ up your game and items and story to absolutely miss unless you consult the wiki. It is barebones in that regard, which is also why I don't suggest it for someone who never played a Soulslike. There is the incentive to try out things yourself, but just because of the time investment that would require, it doesn't feel to pay off and you just check the wiki instead. Lot of such games, which in itself isn't a problem, but I feel this game could have easily dealt with a lot of those things.

And the camera, OH MY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GOD THE CAMERA. This is actually the worst camera I have ever seen in any game, and I must have seen hundreds of bad ones. You can rotate it around freely, but if it touches an enemy or level architecture, it zooms in to not land in the models. Great in idea, absolutely awful in practice. At times you can absolutely see nothing because the camera just says no as you are stuck in a tight spot. You try to actively avoid tight spaces just so the camera doesn't pull out your nails all at once. And you can lock onto enemies, but then because they moved around a centimeter your camera touched that beam above your head and suddenly you no longer see them and die instantly because they swinged just then. It is so so bad, you feel like playing against the controls instead of against the enemies. Often it's just easier to not use it at all because it can hose you so hard at random points.

The input buffer is ridiculous, it is cool that you have to commit to things like a roll, but it's way too high. You can press roll twice in a second and your dude will do two rolls for 10 seconds. Not the worst of the game, but feels very unresponsive at times. The controls are also kinda whack, your jump is on the same button as your run, which makes it really awkward to use properly. There is no reset option for the camera, so often you just run into the void hoping it works out. The backstab range seem often very discolated from the opponents actual backs and arbitraty. Weird hitbox interactions can happen, you can die simply because you stood at the wrong place at the wrong time and the game decided to work against you in that moment.

This is a great game, that rightfully got all the praise, there are enough reviews of why that is so, and I won't mention them. But it's not just a diamond with rough edges, but those are covered in $hit and Ebola as well. It is suffering, and a great point of that suffering is NOT because it is hard. I can suggest it to anyone who doesn't mind those things and enjoys getting backstabbed repeatedly, and seemingly enough people don't mind. But don't think this game will give you a pleasant complete gaming experience or simply respect you, steer away very very far from it in that case.

I just can't recommend that game, I wish I could, but it's "Wasted Potential: The game".
And in total it's simply not fun.

It's a isometric arpg (like diablo) shooter in cyberpunk theme.
Graphically, it's great, some very impressive environments, some good cyberpunk mood comes up. I mainly only bought it because I am a sucker for cyberpunk and needed something actiony to play on steamdeck.

Gameplay-wise, it is bad. Not terribad, and at the start it's pretty fun, but the novelty wears off soon, and all the rough edges and issues show their teeth.
You get loot from enemies but, there's no way to upgrade armor, and the weapons are only upgraded with limited items you find throughout the story. So having a new armor is "cool", but you once you put it on you stop caring about it totally, it becomes just number go up, but without the excitement of improving gear. That's also the same with the skill points, you just dump them into stats and feel nothing. There are no skill-trees or anything, but you have two active goodie slots where you can put in stuff like an activated shield or some special weapons. You also have a grenade that has a lot of different types. But both use the same energy-pool, and if you want to switch during a fight you lose all the energy which can feel annoying. There are some cool ones and some lame ones, but also none upgradeable and many have little impact often.

Weapons are a lot of different types, but the upgrade system is horrible. You get upgrade items of varying strength (can't buy or be randomly dropped) at fixed points, so you can never get all weapons upgraded and you have to decide for a few. But you can easily lock yourself out of a whole upgrade level because one acts as gatekeeper and you have to just play and hope you get a weaker one soon. And finding or buying a new weapons feels not good, because you have to upgrade it to actually be able to determine if it doesn't suck at your current level. You also definitely can mess up your character when you put too many points into different weapons, and then have a bunch where none deals enough damage for your level. So very annoying.

Enemies are decent, but it feels that too often you are just running around in circles to deal with them, and many are just running straight into you to shoot you. There's a cover system and and a roll which add some decent interactions, but it feels more like a nuisance than something fun soon. Weapons have one of four ammo types which has variety but makes it somewhat worse, because you constantly have to switch weapons because one enemy type now appears where only those ammo type weapons deal significant damage and the other deals less. Hope you spread out your points to different types so you don't get hosed there! You can carry two weapons at once and switch quickly which can be fun, but you feel too often forced to use certain ones because of the situations.
And often you simply die without actually knowing what killed, some things just seem to instakill you. Enemies just a level above you can be bulletsponges while dealing way more damage to you. And some areas are just ass, seemingly meant as a "challenge" but just annoying and not fun.

The story is also disappointing. It starts cool, with a decent setting and even lore about different alien species, but it feels to go absolutely nowhere. You just finish jobs for different dudes and keep asking yourself why am I doing this again? One would expect some big revelations and gravity, but it all feels just like some white noise. Which is sad, because it is actually voiced and there would be so much things that could be done to make it interesting, but it's just so uninspired and nothingburger that it can't hold together the environments and characters.

And then add the occasional crashes and bugs and getting stuck in environments and hacking being just lame and somewhat samey environments and no real long-term motivation and that's that.

In the end, it's just not fun long-term. I forced myself through hoping it would get better, but if I think through I maybe had fun only the first four hours and then everything became a slog I only wanted to finish for the sake of it. It's just an utterly mid game, nothing you will ever remember, and honestly nothing I can suggest you putting any time into.

They finally did it, they Johnny-fied the game.

SteamDeck review:

Requires PSN account for login (but there are ways around).
Savegames have to be copied manually into remake save folder for the game to find them, then can be loaded into remake.

Performance: you can expect 10-15 fps LESS than on vanilla, on lowest settings with
SAA antialiasing and no upscaling and no variable resolution. So it goes from a 45-ish fps game down to a 30 fps one.
The heavy lags when traversing chunks seem to be gone, so that's nice.

Graphically looks very different, a lot more colors and lighting at skyboxes are most noticeable. You definitely can say that it looks better, but also like a different game almost, personally I don't like it that much.
Upscaling makes Aloy's shilouette white-ish, which looks strange.
Also because of the detail, there are a lot more shiny edges noticeable if you play at no/low antialiasing.

Conclusion:
Not worth for me, as I value the better performance on the vanilla one for SteamDeck. Graphically also kinda meh, it changes the whole feeling of the game. I will return and keep playing vanilla, maybe in the far future with a beefy PC and the wish to replay it might be worth an investment.

F0cking piece of sh1t game that oneshots your whole team just because it felt like it.

If you absolutely hate yourself, you will have fun though.

Runs like 500 yo Vampire bottocks.

What a shame.
In theory extremely cool idea. Fast-paced ego-shooter rougelike.
What makes it special is that all headshots kill enemies instantly, and you have a slide that let's you duck under enemy shots. BUT the floor is uneven so you have to adjust your reticle constantly to get the headshots in. You lose life constantly but it refills when you kill an enemy with a headshot, so you try to slide through a randomly generated maze as fast as possible while dodging bullets and handing out headshots.
But the game simply lacks polish. You can't adjust the crosshair at all and because of the funky style often you have no clue where you are aiming at the moment. The effects are overbearing, and yes it is part of the charm of the game, but when the time counter blocks your sight completely which made you miss the clutch headshot that would have filled your lifebar just enough to keep going, it gets annoying.
Enemies have a very weird duck-away animation if you miss your shot at them, it feels more like them phaseshifting than anything else, which is okay when they are at range, but which they most often are not.
The mazy is very, well, mazy and that makes it often that enemies are just behind an acute edge, but if you want to dodge their bullets with sliding while hitting them without getting mind-shifted into a fifth dimension because it all happens in an instant, you are sorta stuck in them while they shoot three bullets into you. Often this is your death-sentence, because in such a scenario you can't even find the enemy and often have to stand still and aim even behind you. Not just a flow-breaker but also a killer.
This makes the seemingly most viable tactic against corners to slide by them and just flick up your mouse hoping you hit the enemy's head which will most likely stands behind it. And it feels more a game of chance than of skill.
Actually trying to use the slide-mechanic and get to the end-door asap is often less effective than just taking your time to normally aim, or just run through all of them alltogether. It so barely misses the mark of being a really great experience.
And when it works, it feels amazing. When your edge-luck-shots hit and your enemies don't phase away and you don't end up getting blocked by one of them. But more often than not it feels that you were bullshitted.
Oh, and it has the most aggrevious flaw for such a fast-paced restart-heavy game: Dying and restarting needs more than 5 seconds. I have little tolerance for such games, when a run often lasts less than 5 seconds, I don't want the reload to be more than 2.
It the cherry on the top of small things that make this game not a runner in the end.
But if you like the idea of it and don't mind the experimental nature of it, buy it, it's not like you are getting robbed with the price. But it still feels that it could have been so much more.

Arena-shooter rougelite.
Each level is composed of a bunch of different randomized small arenas with a boss at the end, and every level has unique aesthetics and enemies, but all on a cyberpunk-basis. Cyborgs, spiderbots, robo-geishas, floating death-drone-hives etc, really makes a cyberpunk fan's heart open up. (also a lot of nods to certain tropes and existing cyberpunk-media)
Great music and presentation too, story is not the biggest but it fits for the gameplay/setting and has decent writing. You get to talk to some characters outside of a mission which have more stuff to say to enemies and levels.
Enemies keep spawning throughout an arena and it is highly encouraged that you keep moving if you don't want to die. You can do that with a double-jump and a double-dash and character class-unique things like a grappling hook.
They chase you relentlessly and have unique attacks and movement or shields to which you have to adapt.
Arenas also have respawning resources like grenades, ammo and shield; and floating balls which you can melee; so it is really encouraged that you keep moving and use different routes thoughout the arenas.
You have a main weapon which differs for each of the 4 classes and a sub-weapon which you can switch to one of a different class, which together with the class abilites makes for very unique playstyles.
You can modify your shell with passive and active effects that trigger on skill-use, breaking one of the floaty-balls or switching weapons, so it is also encouraged to use all your arsenal and not to rely only on one thing, just like in an arena-shooter.
You collect resources you find with which you can upgrade things outside of a mission, like getting better weapons or more choices but also better class abilities and offense/defense, which is where the lite part comes in. For the rest, you keep getting better by learning the enemies patterns, the arena layouts, and how to use and combine your classes' unique abilities and upgrades.
If you like arena-shooters, rougelites and games like Doom: Eternal, then you can barely go wrong with it, great game and something which I always wanted to see!

Short but really funny platformer. Basically the swords gets longer and you have to use to get over gaps and tunnels. It's a lot harder than you might think, because it also has momentum and weight, so it goes where it wants. Reminds me of quop a bit

Broken matchmaking, kicks you out of the server most every few minutes.
Also can't even open the menu when the matchmaking is stuck in the background, astounding crafmanship by Capcom again.

Also inputs are ♥♥♥♥♥.

Otherwise cool game, but if you want to play online and don't like self-mutilation, probably wait till they fix it. (which when going from SFV, they might never will