Recent reviews by s3govesus

One of the best first-person shooters ever made, now in Technicolor!

"A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." - Shigeru Miyamoto

The Good:
The music in the game is absolutely amazing - kudos to Jesper Kyd. The environments and architecture are all impressive and well-designed, helping bring the game closer to having impactful and immersive gameplay.

The Bad:
The game suffers from numerous technical issues which ultimately result in why I wouldn't recommend it to people and would instead recommend something like Back 4 Blood if they were looking for a game in the 4-player co-op shooter genre. The game still suffers from frequent crashes, despite the developers having pushed several patches in an effort to fix them. Gameplay ends up feeling extremely clunky and unpleasant due to either poor netcode or overworked servers, which causes the player to need to press many actions multiple times before they'll properly register, such as reloading weapons, swapping weapons, using items, or sometimes even attacking. The engine the game is built on was abandoned in January of 2018 and is no longer in development, and the developers would've been better off using Unreal Engine or even O3DE or Unity, as the game suffers from many optimization and performance issues that likely would've been easier to address in more modern engines that are still actually supported. As far as gameplay is concerned, the four different character classes often do not feel distinct enough, and the Feats you select as you progress in character level are often not very impactful in how the character is played. The developers advertised the game as having something like 70 weapons, but most of those are not very distinct from many others, and a lot of them are so horribly unbalanced that they're basically useless. Penances (Achievements) are often nearly impossible to complete successfully, and if so, often involve mechanics that make it significantly less likely the group as a whole will complete the missions, such as "while on heresy threat or higher kill a monstrosity after damaging 90% of its health with your brain burst."

Overall, the numerous ways the game fails horribly are all things that could be fixed over time, or could've been fixed before launch with more time taken to test and properly address those issues.

Drivatar AI is broken if you play on any difficulty other than the easiest. One or two cars always pulls out way ahead of the pack and it's nearly impossible to catch up with them. When upgrading and tuning your car, the speed/handling/acceleration/etc preview numbers don't actually mean anything, as the effectiveness of the upgrades can vary significantly from what is suggested by those values. The game just has too many weird issues that should be easy to fix, but the developers haven't bothered.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10

Elden Ring is a great introduction to the Soulsborne games for new players and a respectable entry to the catalog for returning fans of FromSoftware's work.

The Good:
- The game world is massive with lots of interesting and visually stunning locations to explore
- Combat is some of the best you can get in the action RPG genre
- The main bosses have interesting designs and serve as memorable encounters
- Itemization is mostly balanced and serves well to allow you to customize your gameplay
- The story is interesting and has an openness to it that gives you a sense of agency in your role in its world, with several possible endings that aren't entirely predictable

The Bad:
- The large, open world lacks emergent AI - enemies are always in the same places doing the same things and unaware of the world around then - and the size of the world combined with the difficulty of the game results in it often feeling tedious
- Enemies and minor bosses are often reused across the different in-game regions and as a result end up feeling like boring chores instead of engaging encounters
- The story is dangerously close to being the same as Dark Souls - something a little more divergent from those games would've been nice
- Many of the characters in the story have very similar names which made it confusing and difficult to follow at times (this is mostly a minor complaint)

Technical Notes:
The PC version of the game is a bit of a sloppy console port with occasional crashes and considerable performance issues. Online play is extremely unreliable during peak hours, with people being kicked from your session every two minutes or so.

The game has gradually become so complex that I have no idea what is going on anymore.

This is a half-assed console port locked to 30fps. Do not encourage this sort of behavior in the gaming industry by buying this game.

Rough around the edges, but still lots of fun, especially with friends.

Civilization VI continues to improve upon the Civilization series by adding more depth and balance to many existing systems from the previous games, effectively making it the best Civilization game yet. If you're new to Civilization, just know that this is the sort of game where you'll sit down with the intent to play for an hour or so and instead end up spending maybe eight hours enthralled in the game! The game has virtually infinite replayability and is probably one of the most captivating games ever made.