Recent reviews by varyag

Excellent game and very easy thumbs up. If you're fond of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, you will feel right at home.

The OST, setting, art, plot, and gameplay balance all come together well and feel authentic. I'm excited to see what Bellular Studios releases next!

Lovely blend of cozy and cosmic horror. Highly recommended! After you're finished go play Dave the Diver.

Dave the Diver is a cool indie game that is dripping with style. It's part management sim, part action adventure.

The gameplay and progression loops feel very well tuned. Everything from the sprites, to the animations, to the environment, and beyond all share the same cool vibe. The characters are all great, and Dave is a total Chad.

If you like cool games, buy it.

Games like this make me love video games again.

DO NOT LOOK ANYTHING UP

tl;dr: Believe the hype: Elden Ring is a phenomenal game, possibly even the best soulsbourne yet. It has some stuttering and performance issues, so if you don't have patience to troubleshoot this stuff maybe wait until these issues get patched.

Background if you care: I'm your average soulbourne enjoyer/masochist. I have enjoyed and finished most of the games at least a couple of times, though I am of pretty average skill and never did anything too crazy. I think Dark Souls has some of the best level and world design of all time, and is the golden standard by which I judge all similar games. I planned to do a blind playthrough of Elden Ring for my first time around, and other than watching the original trailer and a couple of Vaati lore videos I managed to avoid most media surrounding the game. Initially I was a bit skeptical about the open world aspect since I have less time on my hands these days and I'm honestly pretty tired of open world games. So my attitude going in was cautious optimism, because From Software make some of the best games out there.

And From has pulled it off again - barring a few very obviously reused assets the world feels alive, believable, and memorable, and every location is a joy to explore. The combat is visceral and satisfying, the new lore is as rich and obtuse as ever, and almost every boss fight is a great spectacle (particularly the outdoor ones) that leave you breathless after winning. That wonderful dark souls rpg magic is alive and well in the world of Elden Ring. From have added some QoL improvements like shorter boss battle death runs, NPC summons to help the n00bs, the best horse in video games, and fast travel from the get-go (this was also in the last couple of games), making it easily the most accessible soulsbourne game to date and the perfect place to jump into the series. Difficulty is about on par with previous games, so it might take some patience to really "get it" but most people will get there with time. If you get really stuck, you can always summon a friend or two for some jolly cooperation!

Where the game is clearly lacking is in performance; it looks pretty good but it runs quite poorly and frequently stutters even on a 5900X and a 3080 w/ latest drivers. The graphics options are barely passable for a PC port, but honestly in 2022 it is lazy and disrespectful for a AAA game to not support basic options like 21:9 resolutions, vsync toggles (seriously), G-SYNC/freesync, and at least one of the many supersampling techs out there. I expect most of these issues will be the ironed out in time, so I'm not too fussed. That being said, in my experience the core gameplay is basically bug-free, so for me the above problems can be overlooked when looking at the whole package. If the problems I've mentioned bother you a lot then I would recommend you wait until they patch the game.

IMO best ARPG since D2. Such nostalgia feels.

dis game is str8 gr8, would r8 8/8

PLAY DIS GAEM ALL DAE ERR DAE