Recent reviews by Mother K

It's alright. Mostly inconsequential decisions, but wraps up nicely in the end.

I miss Jeff Kaplan

First and foremost, I am extremely happy we have an official FIA WEC game, it's definitely one of my favourite racing series to watch alongside GT World Challenge. Offers some of my favourite car classes (LMDh, GTE). Now, putting feelings aside, purely from a neutral perspective, like an average consumer, I cannot recommend this at it's current state. I know it's Early Access, but there are a glaring issue that is simply unacceptable.

Pros:
- Great physics and sounds, cars handle as I would expect
- Looks good, not on the level of AMS 2, but good.
- Cars interact well with the road with chassis flexing and bumps
- Replay cams and external physics are good, not floaty and canned (Take notes ACC)
- The UI ,design wise, is quite intuitive. Things are placed well, was never lost. It was like second nature.

Cons:
- Menu's are far...FAR too laggy and unresponsive. Pure abysmal. Embarrassing. There was NO WAY this was play-tested. Given that the very first and mandatory thing EVERY player will interact with is the menu, this is a massive issue. You'll find yourself clicking on a button, sometimes multiple times, only to have it respond 15 seconds later. Wanna view your setup and quickly go on track? Takes a few seconds in other simulators, here it will take upwards of 3 minutes as the menu freezes and hitches with every click. Wanna bind a key to a control and go on track? Prepare to waste literally minutes fighting the menu to do that. There is ZERO feedback. The fact that this is pretty much the only negative should tell you how big of an issue it is.

- Some weird choices for Controller settings out of the box, needed some tuning, but this depends heavily on driving style.

Not recommended. Early Access is fine and all, but shouldn't be used as a crutch to ignore issues that are too massive. Now I'm in it for the long haul, so I can put these issues aside as this is a type of simulator I've longed for and when you're driving, it's great! Very fun. I will update this review when this is fixed, but casuals steer clear for now.

Easily one of the best gaming soundtracks, wish I got it on vinyl when they were still available for order. I had to buy this for CD quality, it's really wonderful.

1 year of playing AMS 2 and I can easily say Reiza is one of the best sim racing devs in my book. Constant updates with improvements, bug fixes and new cars and tracks. Each DLC pack is well worth the asking price and offers tons of fun for hours on end. Lots of GT and Formula cars are present.

Of course, they're using Slightly Mad Studios' excellent Madness Engine, and have ironed out some bugs and irregularities that were present in the engine, making what was already the most advanced sim racing engine even better.

- Best Weather simulation w/ best in class water body simulation.
- Best real time track evolution (Nothing else comes even close on a technical level)
- Beautiful graphics and lighting.

Overall, very impressed with the sim and the updates they keep bringing to the table, some of the best races I've ever had right here.

10/10

Once a Halo fan, Always a Halo fan. 343 have managed to turn the game from good to great. What was once a good experience, but sorely lacking in content, has been filled with lots of game modes, abilities, weapons and monthly events. It is now my favourite Halo game after Halo 3 for gunplay. Movement feels very slick and Eternal Time and Space go so hard with the new music every season, can't forget Alex Bhore for his work on Season 1. It's insane how amazing the music is each season.

While customisation has improved, it still has a way to go before getting to the likes of Halo Reach. Most things are seemingly for sale with some unlockable through the weekly challenges. I would've preferred the ranks you have unlocking certain items and having some credit system similar to Halo: Reach. Overall, this is my #1 choice for when I feel like playing a shooter. Iron out those few remaining quirks and bugs and it's golden.

A Poem If You Will

The high Octane fuel stims in his blood, make the bravest lions cower in the mud. As he approaches them with his R-99 in hand, no one against him dares to make a stand. In the distance I hear shots being fired, surely signalling that his enemies have been retired. "He's One Shot" I hear him screaming in repeat, no way The Octrain by his enemies, has been defeat.

But they did. And now he is dead. In the distance, his death box lays ahead. Sigh, Time to use another Respawn Beacon yet again.

The poem concludes with a note

Dear Octanes, stop motherduckingly leaving us and rushing to your death, we aren't as fast as Octane and will never be.

Game is still fun though.

Sincerely, The Entire Userbase

Help me stepbro, I'm stuck!

Coming straight from Samurai Warriors 2, I expected nothing short of fluid and great gameplay and Koei has delivered
with Samurai Warriors 4-II. I'd always prefered the SW games compared to Dynasty Warriors or the
Warriors Orochi games which I played on the Xbox 360.

I'll make many comparisons to Samurai Warriors 2 as that was the last SW game I played, back in 2007 and I recenly played again to get that ever so good Nostalgia feeling.

There are 56 characters playable. All the greats (Fuma, Hattori, Tachibana, Sanada etc) are present and although the story is still based on Sengoku Japan, the game focuses more
on the younger warriors like for example Naomasa Li, who was an NPC in SW2 and Toyohisa Shimazu (The newer generation if you will). I would've appreciated the older, more direct storytelling method of SW2 being used again here.

Simply put, there is less focus on the Warrior you're playing or fighting against and instead the story is more focused on the clan and family of the warriors. But not bad overall, just not great. Players not familiar with the Sengoku Period of Japanese history
might not find the story telling clear and concise.



This is greatly improved, I honestly couldn't see how they could improve from the excellent SW2 without borrowing from the Dynasty Warriors series and they did it. I'd recommend watching a YouTube video on this, gameplay is much faster paced with better AI and new hyper moves.

Running around or long travels to other parts of the map has been reduced because you now actually play as Two Warriors in battle and can swap between them at anytime, this is fantastic. Basically this is the equivalent of playing split screen in Samurai Warriors 2 to cover as much ground as possible.

In terms of Modes, you have Story Modes, Free Mode and Survival. Sadly, Sugoroku is missing which sucks big time for me as I was in the minority who actually adored the mode. As always, battles can be played in Single Player, 2 player Splitscreen or for the first time, online with a friend or somebody else.

Two new movetypes debut here:
Hyper Attacks: Pressing Y now does hyper attacks, which are fast dashes and slashes best used for clearing out crowds
Rage Mode: Borrowed from Dynasty Warriors, this makes you faster and stronger while active. Can also perform True Musou with this. Warriors now have 1 special ability.

The ability to string so many attacks together so smoothly and Warriors having their own fighting styles, you'll be sure to rack up many KO's in each battle. The UI is similar to SW2 for the most part and
there is enough screenspace for even the biggest fights. Only complaint is the game will show keyboard prompts even when using a controlller, which is practically a must for every musou game. There is a mod that fixes this however and takes less than a minute to do it.



Alright this is where things get a bit shaky, Warrior models themselves are great looking, though not fantastic. But for some reason, Koei ported the game over to PC with the Textures from the PS3 version. So the environments look okay with the PS3 textures and the characters look great with the PS4 Textures. WTF!
Though during normal gameplay, this isn't really noticeable unless you pay attention to the environment.

Musou games never really had fantastic graphics and so I wasn't really surprised, but giving PC players the PS3 textures for the environments instead of the PS4 is just plain stupid. Why the mix and match?

Now is it bad to look at? Not at all, it looks good overall, just not great. The optimization is also not that great. There's sections where the framerate takes a nosedive, with no changes to the scene. This usually only lasts for about 3 or 4 seconds before returning to Normal, luckily in my case it doesn't happen very often to be annoying and G-Sync saves my eyes from melting. Some have had lots of trouble with that issue though.



Audio is good. No complaints here and I've always liked the Samurai Warriors soundtrack. This game uses remixed versions of the SW2 soundtrack with some being new entirely, but I would've preferred the originals which were simple and fantastic. Voices are great sounding and really believable. I would've liked to have an English dub as an option, as that was really well done in SW2, but the Japanese audio is really great, so no faults here.



+ It was mostly what I'd hoped for and they delivered.
+ Great gameplay and character models
+ Decent graphics
+ Soundtrack is great (but I wished they had straight up reused the old soundtrack / offered it as some DLC)

- Storytelling is more lackluster than previous
- Occasional Performance Issues
- Keyboard prompts when using controller (Mod can fix this)
- Not really a con, but it's capped at 60 FPS

8/10, Still Fantastic. I really am a sucker for these types of games.

Nostalgia 101