Recent reviews by imperial guardsman

remember what csgo was like in 2014? it's like that kinda. but it'll get better. it's still CS.

Stale and sterile or nostalgic and quaint.

I'm torn between how I'd sum up the Starfield experience. At times, I was happy to while away the morning hours on my days off, plopping down pieces of an outpost or slapping ship modules together. At other times, I was frustrated by the systems for those two loops, frustratingly trying to rotate a piece just so because Bethesda couldn't be bothered with an optional grid for the Outposts or going back into the ship designer for the hundredth time because the logic on where doors and ladders are placed is so opaque that you end up with a labrynthian maze instead of the cozy home in the stars you always dreamed of.

At times, I was amazed by the visuals of the game. The NPCs are the best they've ever looked, the locales delightfully lived in and strewn with visual interest. At other times, those same good looking NPCs disappear into the skybox or walk around without clothes. Those same locales pop up over and over again in different quest loops, the visual interest not even bothering to update whether or not it was Spacers, Fleet, Robots, or Ecliptic inside.

At first, I was happy to manually jump from system to system in the cockpit- the animations of button flipping and HUD countdown to that great bending of space were exciting and captured my sci-fi obsessed imagination. Then the fetch quests, and the go here and talk quests, and the general tedium of Bethesda quest design set in and you spend more time clicking planets in the starmap than actually flying the ship. Made the handful of hours I spent painstakingly fighting with door and ladder logic all the more sour.

Companions are as they have always been. Sycophants masquerading as individuals with all the depth of like... a really thin piece of paper or this analogy. Sarah didn't like that? What a consequence. Please carry my things, mule. Have a long open distance to run? See you later, Barrett. I'll try to find a load screen door so you can teleport to catch up. Perfect shot lined up on a bad guy? Vasco uncrouches in front of the scope and didn't like that you fried his circuits. And all of a sudden that loner perk from character creation seems a lot more enticing.

The one thing that separates Starfield companions from previous Bethesda offerings is that, this time around, there are no slimy rogue types who revel in any debauchery the main character might want to partake in. Every single one of them is a white-knighting no-fun dork with a "tragic" backstory. Tragic in quotes because they're the types of tragedy that Shonda Rhimes packs 4 or 5 deep in a season of Grey's Anatomy so as to make sure the viewer is completely numb to any emotional provocation by the end. I get the plucky sort of 90s Star Trek hopefulness they were going for, but you've allowed for rogueish neredowells in every one of your offerings since the dawn of time, Bethesda. You even have Space Pirate questlines in this. Why is there no companion who will laugh at your fart jokes and encourage you to steal the pack of gum? Someone who's in Constellation for the money, maybe a possible betrayal arc? Just wack. Also, all of the NPCs being playersexual is boring. Just don't have romance.

At its heart, it is a Bethesda game. No ground has been broken here beyond the scope of it. And, if one grew up on Bethesda games, there are elements of this that will scratch that itch. Early on, one of the characters waxes poetic about their experience of space travel and describes the best parts of it as "cozy." That's what Bethesda games are, cozy. The problem is that they so often lack the polish necessary to let you fully relax into that coziness before their dated design and limited engine coughs up an immersion-breaking hairball on your cardigan just as you were starting to forget that your world is burning and hurtling towards destitution in a starfield you will never experience beyond media like this. So it's the job of that media to let you escape into it. This fails too often for me.

Good price point if you subscribe to the idea of $1/hr for games. There's about 30 hours of content in here, give or take depending on restarts and how fast you figure it out. My overall recommendation is a thumbs up but I think I'd still say wait for it to be further along if you want to get some more time out of it.

As of 8/22- there's not a ton of replayability in this because there aren't different ways to succeed. You balance your population with your resource output which means you have build orders. Combat is very unsophisticated. Not much to do in late game but watch the stocks pile up.

Game is fine, there's just no incentive not to corner camp. You can't check every corner when entering a room or an area before being killed by a corner camper. No amount of "git gud" is going to fix that. You just accept that you're going to die and your teammates will get the dude who got you if you're the first one in.

I understand the design choice, but it's still just not fun to die as an attacker over and over again. And I resent that the most successful strategy is to put on dark camo and prone in a corner as a defender.

It's fun when those aren't the prevailing things going on. But you will see this in every match, every game mode, I promise you.

BLUF (Bottom line up front): It's a pretty mediocre open world experience with not-bad but disappointing traversal options. Additionally, outside of the main character, whose delivery and direction was pretty great in my opinion, the voice acting and cinematic animations across the board were really lackluster. Rosario Dawson, who I normally like in movies, does nothing to elevate the plot and was probably a waste of money. From a storytelling perspective, it's flat and unfulfilling.

Bugs: Runs pretty okay on a higher end system. A few bugs where quests get stuck and won't clear after finishing them. You can rerun the last part of them after you load the save each time. Seemed to only happen with side quests.

Gameplay: The combat is just kind of meh. You sort of swing through mobs and there doesn't feel like there's any weight, even with charged up attacks. It would be nice if combos led to random finishers, if the mobs had more animations when interfacting with Aiden, or just anything that made getting swarmed feel like anything other than annoying. It feels like you just clip through everything (sometimes slowly), either with attacks or traversal.

There are locations that you go through to get upgrades for your character. These sites are basically all the same building, the layout of the internal walls is just slightly different. This is like, laughably lazy. None of them have character. Once you've done one, you can do them all.

The anomaly monsters are pretty low threat. I was expecting each of them to have boss like qualities or individual abilities that differentiated them during the fights. But if you go in well equipped, the fight is over so quick. If they have individual abilities, like the flavor text suggests, I didn't see it.

The biggest letdown is the parkour they marketed. Even when the music ramps up after you get a nice line going, it still doesn't have the feeling that earlier parkour games evoked. And like... I don't understand why these survivors set up what are effectively obstacle courses across the rooftops. You could infer they're set up by night runners to break up chases but I don't remember it being specifically mentioned. Just seemed silly.

No transmog. It's first person so it doesn't matter too much, but every game with gear stats should have transmog.

Sounds: Music is fine and forgettable. It does what it needs to.

Environmentals are decent there just need to be MORE. The background shouts during the day and the screams and ambiance at night really work, but once you've heard the loop it gets repetitive.

Voice acting- this is the worst part. I hate bad voice acting. I had bad translations. This game has both. The first NPC you meet sets the tone for the rest of the game- and it's so weird to hear Aiden vs that guy. Aiden's voice actor got real direction and his delivery is approaching Naughty Dog in terms of immersion and emoting. The first NPC sounds like a programmer trying to voice act. It's really bad. Then there's Rosario Dawson. She's not bad, and maybe it's the writing of her character, but she adds nothing to the cast. Hakon's actor is pretty good and his writing doesn't suck. Mia's child voice actor is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying. I dreaded the flashback sequences. Every other NPC has stiff, divorced delivery imho.

Visuals: There's a consistent art style here, and the city is pretty to look at from most angles. The "dungeons" leave a little to be desired, imho, but I don't like dark corridors generally speaking so that's that. The overall graphics are fine, but not cutting edge. Nothing to complain about, but nothing to rave over either.

I don't like any of the armors. But I'm not the demo they're appealing to and that's fine.

Story: This the worst part of the game. It's just nothing. There's no twist that's interesting. There's no relationship to care about. There are no choices that ultimately feel like they matter (outside of what's on the tin. You'll see what I mean.) The main villain, and his motivations, are just absolute throwaway baby's first screenplay. This story is so aggressively mediocre action sci-fi drivel that it makes me think that I should just play all games on mute from now on. Maybe something is lost in translation, maybe I'm cynical, but this was ass.

Overall: A farting 2.5/5. Buy it on sale. Or skip it. You're not missing anything. If you like open world games, like I do, then go for it- it's passable. I don't recommend it overall.

If you were wondering, it's still ass after all these years. If this is a "labor of love" then I shudder to think what the devs would do to something they hate.

I don't understand any of the recent positive reviews. It's ugly, the animations are janky, the UI is a literal joke, vanilla servers are boring, it's still a running simulator.

I like survival sandbox games, I've played them all. But SOMETHING has to happen to keep the player interested aside from finding the same 5 pairs of pants in the 1 of 10 building models in one of the biggest cities on the main map.

Save your time. Developers, give up the ghost.

I don't recommend it yet unless you can get it for 5 or 10 bucks on a sale. Here's the thing, it's in a playable state. It's not bug heavy or anything. It's just a little shallow and samey after awhile.

I like city builders. Been playing them since I first started playing on PC. AOE, Banished, Tropico, SC, Anno, so on and so on. This is fine, but it doesn't ask a lot of the player. You can very accidentally end up, without a ton of optimization or anything, just kind of winning. By the time you reach the third age, unless you can't read, you can have a couple hundred k in your coffers and enough resources to keep you going.

There's only really one gameplay loop: unlock tech, build the chains for that tech, export it. The AI doesn't interfere with you, nothing gets in your way. You just build and stack chips.

So, for me, it's very easy. I've read some stuff saying that there's a learning curve and all that- I don't understand it. In its current state, it feels a little like Civ with training wheels.

I'll come back to it in a year or two when there's some kind of challenge or narrative in.

It's hard to play a game for 328 hours and not recommend it to other players, but let me add some caveats. Let me start by noting that 99.9% of my time in this has been single player, so I can't speak to the multiplayer experience at all.

Overall, it's a great time sink of a game and gave me the same vibes that I got from Rome: TW back in the day. Not in play, at all, but just in overall desire to keep grinding away. I dig switching between grand strategy and fighting and haven't played a game that handles that well since BF 2142 (perma-commander here.)

The combat is simplistic once you get a handle on it, but still feels meaty and satisfying- especially with blood, gore, and tweak mods. After you're significantly leveled up, you can basically cut your way through the battlefield before being one shot by some wild cavalry.

Battle AI is decent and seems to actually take up good defensive or skirmishing positions.

They've added more and more quests which are all fine, but I would like to see some varied flavor text or something. As it stands, two villages side by side can give you the exact same quest. Kinda takes you out of it if you like questing.

My main complaint with this game is more toward end game/kingdom level stuff. It's constant war. Maybe that's how it's meant to be, but for me, it's so unfulfilling. There are no reasons for going to war, no politics, no relations between empires as far as I can tell, no alliances, nothing. What's worse, you can't give orders to armies in your kingdom, and their targeting is completely baffling.

Let's say you're Vlandia and want to expand by taking on Battania. It makes sense that you would focus them rather than spread your resources to other conflicts. Rather than being able to designate a primary war target and dedicating the rest of your forces to defense when the Western Empire invariably attacks you, armies will stand up, march around, try to take on some castle or city deep in territory, get killed, and repeat. Meanwhile, your army is systematically taking basically all of your preferred target- so you get chased off sieges by the entirety of Battanian forces because they're not at war with anyone else at the moment.

The kingdom level of this game is just so unfinished and grindy. Early game is fun, end game is a slog. It's EA, so I hope they refine that as they go, because I can't see myself putting in another 300 hours unless MP goes wild or the kingdom stage of the game gets a decent overhaul.

As of December 18th, I have ~100 hours in this game. Like many, I was highly anticipating this. After about 25 hours, I knew I was finishing out of a sort of begrudging determination to like this thing which I had spent the better part of a couple of years waiting for with bated breath. I have learned a valuable lesson about anticipation. This game has finally flipped my switch to the patient gamer beige side where I will be hanging out until game development turns itself around.

At the time of this review, I would say that this game is mostly only story complete- meaning they mostly fully wrote a story and kind of bolted on some other more or less functional parts. Everything else feels undercooked. It should have been delayed again, maybe by so much as a full year.

I'm not going to regurgitate what you've seen already in the professional reviews you have read, I am just going to say the following:

Cyberpunk 2077 is moments of greatness punctuated with half-hearted disappointments in just-above mediocre open world gameplay. The narrative is overbearingly a downer and railroaded, the illusion of choice is in full effect, the characters, save a few (like Jackie), are impossible to like imho (and I'm a fan of the setting.)

It's like going to a strip club alone. You might get a boner from time to time, but it's a sad boner.

So it's a no from me dog. Wait for bug fixes and content DLC. Buy it on sale.

YMMV.

One of my personal favorite games of all time. The vanilla systems are deep, impressive, and rewarding and mods only crank that to 11. It is a game which you can lose yourself in for hours only to go to bed and ponder your colony plans for the next day. At times hilarious, at others devastating, it is always rich.

At this point, I don't even go for endgame any more. I have colonies that stretch on for 10, 15, 20 years. I enjoy being a feature on the planet.

If you're waiting for a sale, good on you, but it's worth every cent of full price.