Recent reviews by Transmental Me

Unfortunately, I can't recommend this game due to the developer and designers well documented exclusionary views against women. Including scrapping the female player character they had started implementing. The irony is the MC is so androgynous, as most of Atlus MC's, that the story referring to him as a boy is the only way you'd really know he wasn't a girl. Atlus, women play your games too, we are "worth it" despite your developer saying otherwise.

Clown react all you want, I enjoy the steam points.

Granblue Fantasy Relink allows players to choose between Male and Female MCs, and these games should as well. There is nothing in the story so far that would have been impossible to do as a female player. The whole point of the game is to change the world to be more fair and inclusive, yet the developer themselves fails to do so for half the gaming community, which is female.

It's basically Persona in a fantasy realm, the combat is great, the story seems very interesting and the characters are engaging. If it wasn't for the poor antiquated views of the developer and insisting on excluding women protagonists from their titles, I would recommend. Granblue Fantasy Relink found women worth it, so I'm gonna go play that instead.

Buggy mess really only sustained by mods that should be incorporated into the main game but the dev is burnt out.

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Great game when you can play it. You know what to expect if you've played recent games. This is all of that, but finally next-gen and unfortunately, with a lot of crashing.

4K performance is great on top end hardware like the 4080 Super when it runs.

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Crashing is regular and reported by a lot of people, not recommended for $70. The main issue I see right now for myself and others, is crashing. Especially in The W, which is primarily what I play.

I can play a game without any trouble and the game crashes loading back to The W. Other times, loading to The W crashes twice and then I can play a full game. It's pretty absurd for the price tag and all the talk about increased production costs.

Unfortunately, The W is still the only experience for women. I don't mind The W, it's definitely a lot better than not being included at all. I do wish they would just make WNBA a main story and stop holding back what they obviously intend to do eventually.

I can deal with all that. However, the mostly universal experience with crashing is completely unacceptable for this brand and a $70 price tag.. If they fix the bugs and crashes, would recommend.

Until then, 2K25 seems like I'm paying more for a worse product just because layoffs were more important for the shareholders than quality. The game is the same great basketball sim we know, but the crashing makes it impossible to recommend.

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• CPU: AMD 5900x
  
• RAM: Ripjaw 32GB RAM
  
• GFX: 4080 Super 16GB
  
• PSU: 1200W Corsair
  
• OS: Windows 11

Performance is great with good hardware, but only if it doesn't crash. I get a stable 100fps at 4k Ultra with DLSS set to Quality. I get about 65fps average at 4k Native or with DLAA.

That means you could typically expect a stable 60FPS at native 4K with max settings when using my hardware. I prefer using DLAA for anti-aliasing at 4K60, but to each their own there.

I don't play The City, but it performed bad in the previous games and I hear it performs bad in this one too. I'd expect half the above performance in The City with frame stutter or lag spikes likely.

Building ALL shaders is really important if you want to avoid stutters when playing. If a shader gets called that isn't cached, the game will hitch for a half second. I've not experienced any stuttering which others have complained about after building all shaders.

Decent co-op game with friends only, incredibly transphobic and homophobic community, both developer admin and players alike. Relatively easy to find members of the community seeking out LGBTQ+ people to harass them, evidence of admins suspending trans people for simply existing. Human existence isn't political or debatable, if you can't see another human without attacking them then you have a problem. If you see another human attacking someone for existing and you enable that behavior, you're even worse.

*Update
Even more fitting how the horde of toxicity has turned on the dev for something as simple as requiring a PlayStation account for a game published by PlayStation.

What happened to all that role play thrown at trans people?

You're not meant to attach yourself to the character, just connect your PSN account Helldiver. No gender politics, blind democracy and freedom!

The community around this game is sad, its implosion was inevitable and well deserved.

Really loving the game so far. The environments are beautiful and the world feels alive. No real issues with performance and the game is gorgeous with ray tracing. The combat is engaging and lots of options, pawns are useful and not having to always lead the pack is a great experience for characters who prefer a support role. If you liked Dragons Dogma, you'll like Dragon's Dogma 2 but do yourself a favor and understand the hardware requirements for the experience you want to have.

I played 7 hours last night, not a single crash or performance issue even in the city. People will complain about anything, even optional DLC for items you can earn throughout gameplay at a perfectly reasonable pace. I hate MTX but I can still be objective about optional items that are available in-game.

4k@60fps Native or DLSS Quality
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7900x 5.1ghz all core OC
GPU: MSI Ventus RTX 4080 Super
RAM: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaw 6000mhz
Mobo: Asus Prime X670-P
PSU: Corsair HX1000
OS: Windows 11 Pro

Limit frame rate to 60 for smooth and stable gameplay. Unlocked frame rate 80+ in the forest, 70+ in the city.

People will blame anything but their own decisions. The Recommended specs for Dragons Dogma 2 are for a 4k@30 experience. Learn to build a PC for your desired use or stick to consoles and blaming everyone else. There is honest feedback that could be given, like improving pathing in populated environments, but your busted PC isn't one of them.

I'll take your Jesters now.

TLDR: "You could go anywhere, be anyone, do anything... but why would you want to?"

Bland, safe, and ultimately boring from the exploration and combat, to the characters and relationships. There is nothing evocative or awe inspiring to discover. The characters and writing are about as safe and inoffensive as humanly possible. The romance and relationships are far too limited if I'm expected to play for years to come. The few engaging and inspirational moments are truly immersive, like the Ryujin job advertisment and job application process, but they're too far and few between. There are moments where you truly feel like a person living in this world and it is amazing, then it quickly breaks down and you're constantly reminded that you're just playing a shallow space game with an absurd amount of fast traveling. I can't help but feel this game truly should have been a Zenimax game would have been immensely successful given the ESO or F76 MMO treatment with full space exploration and community play that would have put others to shame. As a single player game, it's just not good enough.

They say the game doesn't really start until you reach New Game+, but I can't even get there before I'm bored with the never ending fast travel cut scenes and poorly executed procedural planets that offer nothing truly interesting or fun to do except sprint from Point A to Point B, kill thing C, collect item D, and return to City E to do all over again.

I've played Skyrim for well over a thousand hours across the years because it felt like a deep and immersive world that I could live in as my character and explore my new life in an amazing world despite the severely watered down RPG systems thanks to the modding community. Today you can truly live another life in Skyrim. I couldn't even start moving in with Starfield and didn't even break 40hrs before I'm just done. It isn't engaging or entertaining beyond "that one thing" you thought about doing when you bought it. For me that was Ryujin Corp, I absolutely loved the way the advertisement for the job was just in the world and it really did feel like I was part of the world and living in it.

After that though, you've got nothing driving you forward or inspiring you to keep going. It's just all kind of there and you can't even fly there or explore all of it, you have to fast travel to everything. What's the point of all these planets if you can't even explore them without fast traveling off planet and fast traveling back to the planet in a new location. In Skyrim, you felt bad for fast traveling because you would definitely miss something new and interesting. In Starfield, you have no choice but to fast travel for literally everything. It's constantly breaking your immersion and reminding you that you're just jumping from one cookie cutter scene to the next with a few cool pieces in between. Unfortunately, the few cool pieces in between are just not enough to keep you going or keep you coming back.

This very much feels like a childhood dream project for Todd that he wanted to do before he got too old to see it through. That's completely understandable, but he should have focused on Elder Scrolls 6 and spun off Starfield to Zenimax as an MMO side-project that he collaborated on like with Fallout 76 or ESO. Starfield probably could have stood a chance to be an amazing game as an ESO or F76 style MMO with full space travel. As a single player game it is simply too safe and bland and just feels like it is fishing without a hook.

One of the best RPGs I've played in a long time. The developer really put a lot of work into making the world feel immersive and reactive to your character. You'll find things happen at times that you weren't expecting and it was because you made a choice earlier that you didn't think would have an impact. Love seeing the addition of a background like the Dark Urge and having Lolth Drow return.

My only complaint is that I would like to see more open good/evil dynamics. I really enjoy that there is a choice to be good or evil in each act, but it basically amounts to kill everyone good and destroy the world or try to save everyone. There should be neutral evil/neutral good/true neutral style routes that allow for a bit more nuance with its own impact on the story.

I wouldn't support this developer if he paid me. Hate has no business on Steam, or anywhere else. The game is kinda lame, I couldn't even play it for more than 2 hours. Glad I got in a bundle for pennies, that's all it is worth. Grow up Dolphin.

Played for 5 hours, enjoyed what I played. It was spooky and well presented, but a game breaking bug when resuming my game prevents me from continuing.

Game worked fine yesterday for multiple hours. I get up today to resume and the Resume Game option just loads to a black screen with music and never starts. Looking online several others have hit game breaking bugs when resuming a game after their first play.

I can't recommend a game that you can't play more than once and the game hasn't been updated since 2019, buyer beware.

tl;dr: If you are a fan of Fallout 1 or 2, Brian Fargo, or Wasteland then you'll probably love this game. The atmosphere and gameplay is here but, there are some issues.

So far, the game gives off a wonderful early Fallout vibe, which is incredible. There are lots of companions/rangers to choose from and you can customize them all. The combat works and isn't too much of a struggle on the normal difficulty. That said, there are some issues that just shouldn't be in a supposedly finished product by such a renowned developer.

Unfortunately, several hours in and the first-person conversations mechanic touted on the store-page has been used twice, both in the first 20 minutes. That's 2 conversations that lasted maybe a minute in my entire play through so far. I wouldn't call that bringing Colorado and its sensational landscapes to life with first person conversations. There is lots of atmosphere and the world feels alive, but this touted feature isn't causing it.

There are also many small bugs and systems that need another pass of polish.

Unfortunately, the game still feels very much like a beta with at least one mostly non-existent system and UI bugs that should NOT have made it through to launch.

For example, using a controller to navigate the inventory UI. If you select an item and then press down and then up to navigate the menu, the UI breaks and you have to close the inventory. This is most likely because they've used Unity or built a system like Unity's Canvas and haven't locked the UI movement from going back into the inventory when an item menu is open. The UI inventory system doesn't know that it 'can't' go off the menus when they are open.

The above bug is something I ran into on my own Unity project recently and as an inexperienced indie dev, I fixed it pretty quick. So I really just can't believe inXile missed this and other issues if this is a full release.

For that reason, I really can't recommend what feels like a beta product as a full release. Ultimately, the game will absolutely please fans of Fallout and Wasteland but I can't ignore the issues I've found.

I'll update this review as/if things change.