Recent reviews by xxCross

graphics are great and the options for the old 97' model and original sounds is neat

Although Pit of Goblin is in Early Access, the game does a great job of creating a fun and spooky atmosphere while also adding the perfect co-op element, picking up food in dark lairs occasionally being chased by mobs and trying to meet the goal of gathering enough to feed the goblin king. I really like the pixelated 3D graphics, it's funny and pleasing to look at. I feel like the sound is good too, but I feel like the sound isn't quite there yet in creating that eerie-body-surrounding feeling yet. Definitely fun to play with friends, haven't tried to play with randoms yet but I'm sure that's a full bag of fun on it's own. The environments look beautiful when lit and quite terrifying when your light source gives out.

Just flowing some ideas, but I do feel like there needs to be more ways to defend or fight against mobs. Whenever I see a mob or get attacked by one I feel like it's game over. To counter that, there should be a wide variety of weapons or maybe sometime in the future, a way to spec points into your goblin to improve odds similar to rogue-like games between bucket drops or feedings. Maybe there can be something called "Mushy Boots", where it'll increase stealth by 50% (or some meaningful number) making it harder for mobs to detect? Or maybe something else called "King's Tooth" where it can do a one hit kill to a mob in a melee-back sneak attack but it's extremely expensive or can only be looted somewhere hard?

The game is fun nevertheless and I definitely look forward to where the developers taking THE PIT OF GOBLIN!

Started to play this because I've been following season 2 to the Amazon Prime show "LOTR: The Rings of Power". It's been sitting in my Steam Library for quite some time and I finally summoned the will to crack it open!

The game plays great even 12 years after release, no major bugs experienced. I played this with my 6 year old son and he said he likes the game so much that it's hard for him to put the controller down and wanted to see what happened next. We did proceeded to watch part of the movie (via Prime) so that he can see how the game parallels with the movie, but I think he enjoyed the humor and charm of the lego game more. lol

Not the most intuitive UI, but connecting a controller to the game was easier than expected. I always get nervous when trying to connect any controller to a PC game, but it detected my Xbox-One contoller (with BT, White) as well as my 10 years newer 8bitdo Ultimate via 2.4ghz dongle.

All in all, I'll continue to play this with the little guy as it's just another way to bond. Maybe one day he'll read this review and say "my dad liked this game more than i did but used me as an excuse to play it".

Been playing this with the Wife and so far we've been digging it. What else is there to say?

Grabbed the bundle with the expansion for 70 bux. Kinda a lot, but considering when this game came out freshly released with bugs etc., I'd take base game plus expansion for 70 minus all the bugs now.

my wife and i loves playing this! i've played real life escape rooms before and this game definitely gives me the same feeling! give it a try! WORTH! VR is also super cool!

What a great gem of a game. There are few games that are able to capture my attention and keep me playing. lol Core Keeper has really turned me into a keeper of the core and kept me around for Core Keeper!

Even though the game is in early access, there's a decent amount of content already. At the time of this writing, the latest feature has been the addition of pets and domesticable mobs, like cows and goats. There are a variety of different armor sets and weapons to try different playstyles. I wish there were more sets, gear, etc., but all things considered what the devs has right now is still huge.

The objectives of Core Keeper definitely brings up vibes similar to Valheim boss hunting and Raft island where you try to gear up and build for the next phase. I think Core Keeper does this better by giving you a little more Lore and guidance to that process but still giving you room to breathe and do whatever you want.

The art of Core Keeper is just perfect. I think a good way to describe it is something similar to HD-Pixelation, SNES and GBA style of art but supped up to a modern audience that looks similar to Terraria, Triangle Strategy and Octopath Traveler, but yet Core Keeper has it's own unique style and charm to it. Just a beautiful game!

After 60-70 some hours... my group and I reached "end-game" and now we're just farming mats, optimizing farms, finding new ores to drill, and just trying to max talents on the talent mastery trees. With the addition of pets to the game, now we're theory crafting on how to integrate them into our builds. Speaking of pets, they're super cute and it's fun to see them battle alongside you. The pets even have their own mastery tree too!

I may take a break from Core Keeper for a while before I return to see what's new, but if Core Keeper were to come out with an expansion or some kind of battlepass, I will for sure pick it up and continue to immerse myself in the Core Keeper world.

The game does indeed look amazing with RTX. Even with an RTX 4080, the game WITHOUT DLSS runs at about 60-70 frames. With DLSS it runs at about 140+ frames, which is amazing doubled the frames. To turn on DLSS, press alt-X. I chose the pre-set recommended settings. Though the gameplay is smooth and looks great just like the original, I've noticed that there are some visual artifacts that will pull you away from the experience.

The visual artifacts looks like certain graphics are being stretched. It seems to happen randomly and to any thing. It happens maybe once every 10 - 30 seconds.

I've noticed these artifacts with DLSS on and off, which leads me to conclude it's within the game itself, or perhaps with ray-tracing enabled there's still bugs to squash. If Portal was really your thing and you'd love to come back to the game but with a fresh paint of Ray-Tracing, then this is a great game! But if you are picky about having a smooth and bug free experience, you might want to wait a patch or two to hopefully squash these visual artifacts.

I haven't touched an MMO for a long time, but with New World that changed. The battle system is something that is better to my taste. It's more what I qualify as "skill-based" versus a click and lock-on. PVE or PVP is fun. You could go down a rabbit hole of crafting for hours. There's always something to do. I've been told the world isn't as big as other worlds, but I don't think most people go running around looking at everything so it makes it feel small. But if you truly explored every crack and crevice, new world can feel huge. You can fast travel, but the price is high and forces you think about where you want to fast travel to instead of manually running there. The expeditions are nice little dungeons but can tough to get through if you don't have the right team, level, or gear. After 183 hours, I'm currently level 52, the max level is 60. I'm interested to learn what the end-game looks like. So far so good.

New World has been super fun with friends and is now my group's "Go-To" game at the moment and will probably be the case for the new few months, maybe longer, will see. I hope the studio and Amazon Games takes care of this gaming gem and don't let it fall into MMO purgatory.

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Update - 3000 Hours+ Review - Brimstone Free Expansion
This game have been a roller coaster ride. There's been some downs, but right now New World in it's current form has been great. The gypsum orbs to increase expertise versus watermark was a game changer. The Brimstone addition was huge adding a new desert region, the sandwurm elite trial 20-man raid, the hatchery 10 man arena raid, and other elite areas. Further down the line, there's been addition of more mob types like Humans, and new expeditions. The leaderboard was a much needed addition, and I can't believe the game was going on so long without it now that it's an essential piece to the game.

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Update - 4500 Hours+ Review - Rise of the Angry Earth
I've been on New World almost everyday since release (I don't know if I should feel proud or ashamed about that fact... lol), but I can tell you that the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion has been the BEST state New World has ever been in. No more Resilient, Wards and Banes (well, there is, but they're nerfed and won't drop in the world anymore), and as a result there's a lot more options for build variety, which I and apparently a lot of other players likes. For the players that had ward-sets like myself, we definitely got burned, BUT I think for the greater good and longevity of the game, I suppose that's something I can accept.

I really like the addition of Artifacts, which are basically OP gear that usually has illegal perks or a unique perk that cannot be dropped in regular loot gear. Farming for Artifacts is fun and seeing the volume of other players also trying to obtain the Artifact drop is a great experience. Unlocking the full potential of an Artifact requires you to perform certain things, kill a boss, kill X number of Z mobs type from zone Y, for example. It's kind of annoying, but it gives the player a reason to wander the open world and actually use your mount.

Speaking of Mount, just WOW. New World devs did a great job with Mounts. Mounts look good, the value-added of this new feature actually feels meaningful, and the racing-quests feels worthwhile because it'll buff your mount, like make it faster for example.

Crafting feels a bit intimidating this patch, but crafters now have the ability to craft the exact item they want, which is cool albeit for an insane price!

The new beast mob types are "beasty", my favorite beast mob must be the mammoths. They're huge and are intimidating! But once you break their stamina they're quite easy to defeat.

I haven't done a whole lot of PVP at the time of writing, but it's to safe to say that it'll take a while to see where the meta shifts to now that build variety has opened up with the removal of resilient and introduction of artifacts.

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6500 hours Review - New World Aeternum
New World Aeternum has been the best iteration of New World yet. Cross platform with PS5 and Xbox, plus crossworld for OPR and 3v3 has been great. The player population has boomed and there's so much activity going on.

The two biggest things to do in the end-game though is the 10-man raid "Gorgon Hive" and the PVP island "the cursed mists".

For the raid, It's definitely not easy with a PUG, but if you pull together a team strategically with a strat, then it's actually beatable in about 40 minutes. Lots of groups has been struggling and passing the 3 hour mark, so it's definitely hard. The key I think is to have a solid tank and melee dps. The team should be on voicechat and players should be making calls throughout the run. The loot only drops on bosses though, giving you 3 opportunities to gain some.

The PVP island on the otherhand, I think AGS did a great job developing this area, the atmosphere and environment is S-tier. There's so much detail to buildings, things looks great and feels eerie, but the best part is since you don't know if another player is watching you you're always on edge. The problem though is most interactions just passes by, minding their own business. I think AGS needs to introduce a way to force confrontation, maybe a storm circle every once in a while?

For early-game, AGS polished the story and added full voice acting to every NPC interaction, quite amazing if you'd ask me.

Along with the Aeternum release refresh, there's a host of new artifacts which should inspire players to develop new builds and change the meta. The game definitely plays smoother, and now there's option for DX12 (beta). Graphic-wise, there's also options for AI-upscaling (FSR, DLSS), which is nice.

For the past 6 months since AGS made their summer announcement, I've been SUPER skeptical and took a break for about a month (the longest I have since release lol), but now that the game is here, I feel pretty good and am confident in saying that AGS made the right call. I just hope the steer the NW boat in the right direction and don't let the game crash and burn, it's a precious gem in the online gaming world as there are no other games quite like it.

A few more thoughts, I understand AGS wants players to participate in the new activities, but leaving mutations out of gaining 725 gear feels criminal. That means the Hive is going to get boring real quick, unless that is they mutate the Hive too, which I doubt that'll happen.

The game is in the best state it's ever been, now is a great time to join.

Been in for about 3 hours. So far so good!

Love it. One of the few games you could play with 4+ friends that isn't an MMO, battle royale or pvp.