Recent reviews by TrevorNT

Cute anime waifus? Yep, it's got those. But what else does it have?

- A confusing, meandering, and ultimately un-engaging story
- Game modes that are just too easy - have the right characters and level them up and wham, everything dies
- Bosses that are more bullet sponge than mechanic laden
- Japanese voices when you ask for the English voices for the characters
- Multiplayer content that is largely doable as a single player
- An eerie, largely white and grey asthetic permeating most environments including the home base
- An uninspiring soundtrack

Apologies to the devs who, to their credit, are tackling head-on the scourge of ugly women in modern games, but you've gotta give us more than that

I can recommend Rift Apart for the gameplay, or maybe the gunplay. That part hasn't been lost from the R&C games. The graphics are really nice too.

What I can't recommend is...well, everything else. The weapon upgrade trees are meh. The story is uninspiring. The characters are so-so. Rivet seems fairly interesting as a character. But Ratchet's character has become more bland and hollowed-out with each iteration since the PS2 games. Clank is missing a lot of his humor. And Nefarious again? Armin Shimerman predictably puts on a good performance, but Insomniac really needs to start writing more villains for R&C. Nefarious is incredibly stale.

I'm giving this a "Recommend" against my better judgment for the gameplay. The next one I won't be so kind on unless the writing improves.

It's sad, for as much time as I've put into the game so far, but I just can't recommend the game. Some parts of it are quite good, the building and customization of your home/workshop, and some of the lore around Sandrock itself. The problem with the game is the nonsensical story, and the awkward, clumsy attempts to make Sandrock feel like a community when it often misses the mark. The dialogue comes off really stilted and clunky too. I really wanted to like Sandrock, but in the end just couldn't.

A fun game about creating a network of subway stations, with nostalgic pixelated graphics and great musical tunes.

The game lives the "easy to learn, hard to master" mantra, with game mechanics that get progressively more complicated as you delve deeper into the subway network: in the Zone 5 stations you'll only have two tracks and entrances on a small map and your passengers will only yearn for benches and maybe some plants. By Zone 2 you'll have to plan out five separate tracks with passenger ingress from four or five entrances, and those new passengers will want comfy benches, plants, aquariums, tons of shopping, maps of your station, and signboards to tell them how late they are. Those passengers will become more complicated too; in the early stations you'll have to help them find their way around and maybe ensure they don't sneeze on others (taking on a whole new meaning in COVID days!), while in the later game they'll have heart attacks, commuter rage, stomach flu, drunkenness, destructive tendencies, and far more.

In short, what makes the game great isn't just the appearance, it's that it scales you up gradually into building complicated station ecosystems and networking all of the tracks together so that people can get around. By the end you'll be looking back on each station with pride and admiring their well-planned-out splendor. Or, if you're anything like me, you'll be demolishing them for the thirty-third time to try to make them better...

This is a train I hopped on early: Half-Life was awesome, and seeing it in all its redone glory is amazing. It's true to the original but in much, *much* greater detail. If you've played Half-Life before and loved it, get Black Mesa. If you've never played Half-Life, get Black Mesa and see what you've been missing out on all this time.

It's Galaga in VR, and it's a lot of fun, even though there isn't a ton of content. At $5, it's absolutely worth it.

This game and Beat Saber are *the* VR must-haves. In a nutshell: you become Neo in the Matrix, able to duck and dodge bullets, swords, etc. and fight back in slow motion. Though there's not a ton of content in the game, it's just so much fun completing the scenarios that it's hard not to come back and do it all over again, and they have additional game modes, like real-time and hardcore. Your friends will want to play it too. All the better if you can get it at a discount.

Destiny 2 is an online MMO shooter. It retains the two best things about the original: the snappy fun gunplay that makes it just so satisfying to nail a Vex in the juicebox from far away, and the cinematic score - the music is an absolute delight. It makes so many other improvements, too: the story, for instance, which is clear and coherent from end to end instead of being impossible to understand like it was in D1. The environments are larger, more detailed, and very beautiful. The PC build of the game is super optimized, so that even at 1440 on a GTX 980 I can push 120 frames at decently high quality. There's tons of content, most of it very good, though I'd still retain my dayjob if I were you. And the base game is free now, so there's almost no reason not to try it.

Think of it as something of a VR tech demo: you literally drive an aircar around a city (until the gas runs out). Very therapeutic. Also, free. VR games like this are great because even though you're clearly not in motion in the real world you can at least suspend your disbelief given that you're in a cockpit in the virtual one. If you like that, Elite: Dangerous would also be a good choice for something a little more intense.

For those of you who used to play it waaay back when, it's like TrackMania: Nations Forever. Except it's better.

TrackMania is widely known as being one of the most difficult racing games ever - to beat the different achievements ("medals") on each track, you need to clock some seriously freaking amazing times. And then there's the so-called "Author Medal" - the medal you can only achieve by beating the best time set by the track's creator. I've played this game and TM:NF for years and I've only ever earned about three of them, at best.

The visuals of this game are absolutely stunning, bringing the cars, tracks, and of course the stadium itself, truly to life.

The amount of content in the game is virtually limitless, from user creations in the Workshop to tracks you can put together yourself. The map creator gives you literally as much flexibility as the game's creators had, and is super easy to use.

The multiplayer is a lot of fun too - connecting to servers and racing live with other players, or even having everyone individually clock their own best times, with a time limit to see who can clock the best time the fastest. It's very easy to set up a server of your own too!

And I also like the "Official Time" function - that's something they didn't have before in TM:NF. It's solo-play, except that you can observe your best times and how they stack up to other players across your state, country, or across the globe.

The music, as it was in TM:NF, isn't amazing (it's not bad, but not great either), but then again, it's the gameplay we're after, right?

The only real gripe I had about the game is this: I noticed very quickly going through the White-level (easiest) tracks that a number of tracks were re-used from TM:NF, just adapted to the new graphics engine. Really? If I wanted to play those again, I would have just gotten the free download of Nations instead.

But all-in-all, I recommend that you go for it, especially if you love racing and you love a challenge. After all, it's only $10, and it comes with the free demo of ShootMania Elite.