Recent reviews by SIGILL

So far not worth the €15,- I paid. I haven't seen all DLC content, but I can already tell it doesn't feel like a professional, official game expansion. On top of the new content appearing to not be worth its price, the base game update released at the same time to support the DLC is a buggy mess. It makes me wonder if it has been properly tested at all. I try to not sound too negative in Steam reviews, but the more I think about this DLC the more I feel just very disappointed and bummed out by the fact that a game I enjoyed so much has been given this almost amateurish treatment. This makes the game less fun instead of more exciting like Survivors of the Void did.

Great space game for those that enjoy building and customizing their own spaceships and/or tactical space combat. The design of your ships matters: not only do you have to manage energy, ammo, speed, maneuverability, defense and crew but the placement of the different modules make a difference too. Each module can be targeted and destroyed individually, which allows for fun tactics in combat. Especially if your goals is to salvage as much of the opponent's ships as possible.
(Writing this for Steam Awards goals, will probably add to this later)

Although this is a 'positive' recommendation because of the binary options Steam gives me, I do have mixed feelings about The Past Within. I knew what I was getting into before buying it and I got exactly that out of the game: a cheap, casual, fun and relaxing but also pretty short co-op game without too much depth. This 'recommended' is for those that are able to enjoy exactly that. And I'm one of them, to be clear. I enjoyed playing through it with a friend, but the game doesn't offer much replay value nor a deep story or complex mechanics - you're essentially taking turns communicating instructions to your partner to progress through the game. Towards an ending that I felt wasn't very satisfactory and that left me feeling like I was missing many pieces of a/the story.
Be sure to play with a partner that is open and enthusiastic about trying this game; I think it's a major factor necessary for a positive experience.

Wow. Disco Elysium made me feel emotions. And I don't mean that in a funny, meme-y way. I don't often feel emotions, not when playing games, not when watching movies, not when reading books, or frankly not when living my life in general. But with Disco Elysium I have laughed, I have cried, I have felt excitement and I have even felt fear. I'm very impressed by the writing, world building and the concepts and ideas it touches upon and the fact that it doesn't shy away from harsh statements.

Now, looking at is as a game.. I'm actually not sure if it can be called a game. It's more of an interactive story or an interactive dialogue even, with some RPG stats and point-and-click features thrown in that honestly don't add all that much to the overall experience in my opinion. For me that's okay, I enjoyed it but that was mainly because of the excellent writing, themes and world building. The game revolves around reading text and responding to it though. There is no real 'action' to be found, very little animations and moving around the world only serves to connect different characters or locations providing different dialogues. This got a bit tedious at times because I wasn't sure how to proceed and I just walked up and down the rather static world, trying to find the missing piece, the one dialogue option I had missed. If you're someone who gets bored by slow games filled with text, lacking any kind of interactive action such as combat, racing or the likes, I would recommend you give this game a pass, even though I would still be completely hyped and talk to you about Disco Elysium ad nausea.

I'd say this is a 9.5/10 interactive story/dialogue, I loved almost every minute of it.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is, just like the first game, a great turnbased RPG. Overall it's an improvement over D:OS, with different races to choose from, more spells and skills and optional side-quests and dialogue options specific to certain pre-made characters. I may extend this recommendation with more details, but for now I would like to mention something that makes this game something like a 7.5/10 instead of a 9/10 for me.

The final part of the game is horrible. It feels like either an intern was given the honor of designing the final part of the game, or the development team simply had to rush the game out for release and just tacked it on last-minute. For all the things the game did right, for all the sense of building/working towards something as a player... the end does so many things wrong that it spoils the entire experience. It's so anti-climactic that both me and the 3 other people I played with were majorly disappointed after finishing the game, it left quite a sour taste. So.. be warned, I guess.

Sekiro is a difficult but rewarding game. Even though it's from the same developer as Dark Souls, the game feels quite different, both gameplay and world building. I felt the world and lore wasn't as intriguing or deep as the Dark Souls worlds, which was a bit disappointing, but the gameplay made up for that. Focused more on stealth/fast paced action/fighting and less on building a character, Sekiro pushes the player to master a limited set of available actions and skills. Timing of blocking and dodging is both unforgiving and essential to learn, because most enemies will be able to soak up a lot (and I mean A LOT) more damage than the player character.
Sadly I'm writing this review for the Steam awards badge and I'm not sure what else to say because the review doesn't come too naturally at the moment, but I may update this in the future. I'll just say that this is one of the most frustrating, satisfying, rewarding and adrenaline-generating games I've played in a long while.

I just completed Bayonetta, and recommend the game because I had fun. However, the main impression the game left on me is "what the hell did I just play?". I am very confused by the story. I have no idea what story the game tried to tell. There are characters in the story that don't seem to serve any purpose at all, even though they are recurring. I figured that I perhaps was missing some backstory from previous games or something, but I don't think that is actually the case. The setting is also strange and in my opinion not really fleshed out, which leaves me with plenty of questions. I just... I don't really have words to express my confusion, it might be me not being used to Japanese (console) games, I don't know.

Anyway, the game is rather easy on normal difficulty. I have very little experience (nor skill) with fighting games such as this one, and only in the last few chapters I felt like the game was actually a bit challenging. As with the story though, the gameplay was a bit strange. The main part of the game consists of fighting sequences, but there are some very arcadey running/evading and vehicle-on-rails sequences that to me felt like they didn't fit in too well. This is probably because I always try to take games seriously, even though Bayonetta clearly doesn't take itself seriously. My mistake I think.
Also, there are three things that I really dislike in games, and this one has all of them: quicktime events, phased boss fights and 'camera fights' (bad camera angles). Despite those things the game is fun and easy enough to warrant a recommendation though.

Long story short: I can recommend this if you're looking to play a fun fighting/action game without expecting a story that makes sense.

Fun Captain Forever-esque vehicle building game. Sadly enough there isn't really an end-game after unlocking all parts, but for those that like building just for the sake of it there is no limit on the amount of enjoyment to be had.

The controls for flying vehicles are quirky and limited, so the options for building such vehicles are artificially limited by the controls unfortunately. No propellor-driven planes that occasionally may use a jet booster, you either don't have any propulsion active at all or you have both the propellor and the boosters active.

I'd give this game a 8/10, taking into account its current price of €25,-.

The most enjoyable action (RPG) game I have played so far. The combat is faster than the combat in Dark Souls 1 and 2 and feels very responsive (except when dealing with laggy PvPers unfortunately). The game is visually pleasing and the level design is pretty good. The atmosphere isn't as amazing and mysteriously dark fantasy as the atmosphere in Dark Souls 1, but it is good nonetheless.

The unique way of storytelling/lore building (by dividing most of it over a lot of little item descriptions) and the optional questing (NPC's with 'quests' can easily be overlooked and it is very easy to accidentally skip a required step in a questline) make for an atmosphere that I have so far only experienced in the Dark Souls series. Definitely a recommendation for those that enjoy at first not having a clue what's going on, and then having to actively try to piece together the story and lore.

Even though the player starts out with a 'class', there are no actual set classes, it's perfectly possible to play as a tanky pyro-sorcerer with a crossbow or greatsword sidearm. The different playstyles and weapons are fun to use, and even though some weapons are underpowered and essentially useless it's still fun to mess around with them at times. Dying and losing fights is almost never unfair, you just have to be a skillful dodger/timer and in some cases have a lot of patience. I say "almost never unfair" because there have been occasions where I died because I was actually fighting the camera angle or camera lock instead of a boss, which seems to happen more often with large non-humanoid creatures.

I also mentioned multiplayer. Co-op and PvP are optional and can be a lot of fun, but as with all online-games the quality of online play is also determined by the behaviour of other players and the amount of noticeable lag. I have been playing with friends from The Netherlands (where I live as well) and I haven't had any lag issues, but unfortunately I can't say the same for playing with random, 'public' players. Most of them seem to be laggy to some extend, and in extreme (perhaps intentional?) cases it makes PvPing impossible. We also observed that NPC's appear to suffer from lag for all players as well if only one of the connected players has lag. Overall I can say that playing co-op with friends has been satisfying and PvP can be fun, but the often present lag makes the PvP experience less enjoyable and fair than it could be.

Despite little shortcomings, Dark Souls III is a must-have for people looking to play a solid action RPG game. None of the other games I have played come close to being as satisfying and interesting as this one.

At the time of writing I have played ELEX for just 6 hours, and I am planning on playing it some more because I'm still only getting started. It's unusual for me to write a (not-)recommendation before finishing or at least making good progress in the game, because it may just have a very slow start. From what I have read and from my experience so far, ELEX definitely seems to be one of those games. And yet I'm writing this review, simply because the basic gameplay and implementations are in my opinion lacking in such ways that I'm certain that my opinion on them will not change when I make some more progress.

Before buying the game I have read user reviews, so I already had an idea what I was getting myself into and I didn't really had high expectations. My main reason for buying ELEX is my interest in 'science fantasy', as their marketing calls it. I have been thinking of creating such an open world, including similar factions, for over 10 years now, and because games with that setting are pretty rare I was very curious to see the approach Piranha Bytes had taken to bring such a world to life.

Now, even though I did not expect much, I was still unpleasantly surprised by a couple of aspects of the game:

- The game world is large and the player is free to explore from the moment they exit the starting area (first +- 3 minutes). Unfortunately the world as far as I have explored it feels empty and uninteresting, in a 'lacking detail and variation' kind of way. To me it feels very similar to a MMO world, where the world is mainly a place where hostile creatures are evenly distributed for the player's killing pleasure, instead of a world where each and every location or even every building can tell/imply its own story through clever placement of items to keep exploring fun and rewarding. The limited range at which grass and small vegetation is rendered combined with the already sparse foliage in areas that are supposed to be forest-y also add to the emptiness. Regarding variation, the fact that there are different biomes at a world-level does not hide the obvious re-use of a limited set of assets that populate each biome, quickly making exploring feel repetitive.

- The UI feels like it has been an afterthought, like a prototype that has been thrown together in half a day. It's very flat, unintuitive and in my opinion doesn't even fit the visual style of the game. It also seems to be missing a 'current xp for this level' field, or at least I have not been able to find it. This causes the 'you gained [xxx] experience points' messages to be meaningless, because I don't know how much I need to gain a level.

- For a 2017 game, it isn't pretty. The amount of detail of objects and the world feel inconsistent. The terrain feels low-poly/low texture resolution, which is especially visible at hills and cliffs. Buildings also seem to be low-poly with low-res textures, while small objects look relatively crisp. I have also noticed a lot of cases where textures didn't properly tile or connect, even on simple brick walls. The lighting isn't convincing for a modern game either, for example it feels like the reflectiveness of metals is nonexistent or else very inaccurate.

- Combat feels clunky, uninteresting and unbalanced. There is very little variation in combatstyles and the animations during combat feel slow and inaccurate. To me the combat felt as if I was playing a game from the late 90's/early 00's, it simply lacks the polish that I have come to expect in a game that features real-time melee combat nowadays.
I knew beforehand that ELEX has punishing combat, and I don't mind challenges. However, the way it is implemented feels so unbalanced that it is breaking immersion for me. Why do I do only about 2% of damage per melee hit to an opponent that has no special status, no visible armor and is not marked as 'dangerously high level', while that same opponent can kill me with a similar weapon with a single hit or combo? I understand that things should get better when I level up, but that doesn't mean that I can't be baffled by how unbalanced the first hours feel.

- There is a lot of (fully voiced!) dialogue in the game, which I usually like in RPGs. Not really in ELEX though. Dialogues often seem to repeat the same thing in three different ways, as if the NPCs really, really, really desperately want to make sure their point comes across. The first time I found it amusing, because I thought it was a characteristic of that specific NPC, but when I observed the same behaviour when talking to other NPCs it simply became annoying. It also seems like an attempt at humor was made during dialogues, in which case those attempts embarassingly failed.


On a more positive note, despite its shortcomings I strangely enough do still enjoy playing the game. The jetpack makes for fun vertical exploration, even though it's a bit gimmicky so far. The freedom to explore and the prospect of joining one of the factions as and when I see fit are fun. I can see that the developers really tried to make a great game, and they probably did the best they could. I just cannot recommend ELEX because in my opinion it 'objectively' isn't a good game and I know that a lot of people I know would simply get frustrated and/or bored with the game very fast. Had this game been released 10 years ago it may have been worth the full €50,- price, but not in 2018.