Recent reviews by StuckWithLuck

Plenty of games let you kill Nazis. But not enough allow you to beat Nazis to death with a used plunger.

This game does that and much, much more.

For the first time in a long time for the Indiana Jones franchise, we have a game that is not just a rip off of Tomb Raider or Uncharted. This game understands what actually makes Indiana Jones movies (the good ones anyway) fun to watch; the fact that Indiana Jones is not Rambo. Jones is a swashbuckling action hero, yes. But he's also just a guy. A guy who loses fights, and gets beat up, and runs from guys with rocket launchers and machine guns more than he actually takes them on. Indiana Jones doesn't care about killing enemies, he cares about finding ancient treasure and living to tell about it. Machine Games truly understands this, and has created the perfect Indiana Jones video game.

It's full of fun puzzles, stealth, fist fights, and absolutely top tier sound design. The writing and acting are good, and the story compelling, plus the graphics are really nice on a decent quality PC.

Honestly, I don't know how you could do a game like this any better. It's not everything to everyone, but it's exactly what an Indiana Jones experience should be.

Fallout 4.

Fore some added context for my review, I also own this game on Playstation where I've put about 100 additional hours into it, so I've definitely played a ton of this game.

It's a divisive title for fans of the series, for sure. But for me, I think in 2024, this really is the best one to be playing if you are a newcomer to the series, or if you're looking for an experience that's not entirely riddled with bugs that requires serious modding to become decent.

Other Fallout games may be better with certain mods installed, but Fallout 4 is easily the best out-of-the-box, ready to go, complete single player Fallout experience you can get.

It's got a lot to like too. There's a ton of excellent crafting and scavenging in this game, which you'll probably like if the idea of Fallout appeals to you. The gun play/combat is really satisfying, and there are some fantastically written quests and a decent cadre of fun/interesting NPCs for you to interact with. There are a ton of interesting locations to explore which can make even some of the more dull quests interesting. Additionally, while this game doesn't need mods to be good, mods can take this game to a whole other level, introducing a ton of QOL fixes, graphical enhancements and nice-to-haves that give the game the last bit of polish Bethesda really should have given it in 2014.

As for it's flaws, there are also many. The dialogue system itself is very basic, and not up to snuff with the rest of the series or even other RPGs of this era (and definitely not as good as modern RPGs). The levelling system is flexible, but also feels a bit underwhelming at times, with progress coming exceptionally slow. Honestly, levelling up in this game is a bit of a grind. No more than most Bethesda titles, but it does mean that you'll need to heavily invest your time if you actually want to max out your character. Additionally, a lot of the writing in the main quest line isn't that good, and while there are some fantastic quests, there are a lot of very basic ones as well, which do kind of become a drag eventually.

Overall, it's a lot of fun, and certainly a great game worth your time. But it's also definitely not without its flaws.

I am having a great time returning to this game after 22 years.

This remaster has been pretty good, there are a couple bugs with sound, changed up the game menu, added more settings/QOL updates and they have re-recorded all the dialogue of the campagins with new voice actors.

I love the decisions they made with the visuals. It's not a full re-rendering into modern graphics, it still retains the blocky charm of the early 2000's, but the motion is all smoother, the textures look more detailed and the upscaling from the 2002 version also looks great.

Crucially, the music remains identical sounding to the original. Along with most of the iconic lines and monster noises. Though, there are some updated/changed notification noises.

They added villager auto-tasking, which I would not really recommend turning on, because it has a tendancy to just blindly send your workers to get any reasourse regardless of distance to drop point or potential hazards. So unless you have way too much going on, have control over large swaths of the map, and can't handle retasking all your workers constantly, I wouldn't recommend using it. Late game only, basically.

This remaster really does feel like the superior way to experience this game now. It's not without it's flaws, but for fans of the original game, or early 2000's RTS games, this is a classic that won't disappoint.

You can pet the dog.

10/10