Recent reviews by Veggie Vader

Investigating a letter from his late wife, James returns to where they made so many memories - Silent Hill. What he finds is a ghost town, prowled by disturbing monsters and cloaked in deep fog. Confront the monsters, solve puzzles, and search for traces of your wife in this remake of SILENT HILL 2.

You play as James Sunderland who receives a letter from his dead wife Mary who died three years ago. In the letter, Mary asks James to come to Silent Hill, which is the last place they were happy on vacation together. Strange things start happening when James arrives in Silent Hill, and there are nasty monsters hiding in the fog. The story is quite interesting and I don’t want to spoil it.

The game is played in third person, similar to the Resident Evil 2 remake. You start with just a plank as a melee weapon before finding a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle and a steel pipe. These are the only weapons in the game. I didn’t like how melee works in this game at all. It felt pretty wonky. The weapons can’t be upgraded in any way, which would have been fun to do. The weapons feel quite okay, no special feeling when you fire them. The game also consists of a lot of puzzles. For the most part, I think the puzzles were very good, which vary a bit depending on what difficulty you play on.

The game takes place in a creepy town called Silent Hill. The whole town is covered in a thick unpleasant fog with monsters roaming the streets. You get to explore the streets and houses of Silent Hill in two different worlds; the regular world and the Otherworld/Nightmare world. The Otherworld is a more worn out, decayed, filthy and slimy version of the town. Here you meet the iconic Pyramid Head, which is a symbol of the repressed anger and guilt of the protagonist.

They have succeeded well in creating a scary atmosphere. The game does not consist of cheap jump scares. Many scares consist of enemies that stand still and blend in with the surroundings and starts to move when you approach. These are the scares that scared med the most. You will find a radio at the beginning of the game that emits static when monsters are nearby. I turned the radio off as soon as I found it, because I didn't want to know when enemies were nearby. It becomes scarier that way and I recommend you turn it off too.

There isn't a huge variety of enemies in Silent Hill 2, and they aren't particularly dangerous either, which makes the game pretty easy. They are pretty slow and passive. This becomes a bit boring after a while.

The bosses aren't particularly difficult either and are pretty simple. The last boss was pretty disturbing and scary.

Visually the game looks good, nothing special though. The enemies and bosses look unpleasant and disturbing.

The sound design and music of the game is a bit better though, and adds a lot to creating an unpleasant atmosphere.

I don't have much to complain about in this game. The game is well made, but the enemy encounters and combat gets a little bit repetitive after a while. The melee system could have been better. I find it really awkward to melee in this game, especially crawling enemies.

The biggest problem with the game is that it suffers from performance issues, pretty badly. The game crashes often, there are FPS drops, stuttering, etc. Graphic settings do not seem to matter. I tried everything to make the lag go away, but nothing helped. It seems like many people have the same problem, but still the game has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam. I don’t get it. Usually when a game comes out with performance issues like these, people tend to review bomb the game with negativity. I think the nostalgia trip many people get from this remake probably trumps these performance issues, but I don’t know. The game has been out for a couple of months now and it is still not fixed! Unacceptable really, but the game itself is good.

Many people say that Silent Hill 2 is one of the scariest horror games, or even THE scariest horror game of all time. I disagree. It is a good game, but I was disappointed with the horror. It really wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. First of all, I always think that horror games are scarier when played in first person. I also think that horror games are always scarier if you have no weapons to defend yourself with, or you can have weapons but they are used only on rare occasions with very limited ammo, like in Amnesia: The Bunker. That is probably the scariest game I have played even when you have weapons.

I never played the Silent Hill games back in the days when they came out. This remake is the only game in the series that I have played, and the P.T. demo. Silent Hill 2 is a good game, but not as good as I thought it would be. I like the Resident Evil series much more. I probably would have liked Silent Hill 2 more if I had played it when I was a kid and now get to play it again for the nostalgia that many do. I recommend the game, but I don't recommend buying it right now. Wait for a proper sale and wait until they fix all the performance issues.

The Beast Inside is a unique, gripping twist on thriller and survival horror. Immerse in the story of long-buried secrets, personal tragedies, and madness. Play as two protagonists bounded by dark heritage. Combat the enemies, solve riddles and experience real terror in the 3D-scanned environment.

The Beast Inside takes place in two parallel timelines. The present is 1979 where you play as Adam and the past takes place in 1864 as Nicolas. Their lives become interconnected as they work to unravel an unsolved murder mystery. Adam and his wife Emma move into a new home, a house that Adam inherited. In the house, Adam finds a diary that belonged to Nicolas. Every time you find a new clue from the past that has to do with Nicolas, you will then play a chapter as Nicolas, then back to Adam again and so the game continues for 13 chapters. The game takes between 7-9 hours.

I would say that this is a heavily narrative-focused puzzle game with elements of horror. You notice that the game developers have taken inspiration from games like Firewatch, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Resident Evil 7 when it comes to several things. You can open boxes and throw items just like in Amnesia, and you also have a refillable lantern just like in Amnesia. At one point in the game, you are in a swamp and are being chased by water monsters in the same way as in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You are also in a house and are being chased by an old lady that reminds of the greenhouse in Resident Evil 7. The game also has a lot of puzzles that must be solved in order to progress. When you play as Adam, you have a device, the Quantum Localizer, which you must use to scan the environment and find clues and destroy anomalies.

The surroundings vary quite a lot. They vary between the house that Adam moves into, a hotel, caves, mines, forests, and some other random houses in the area.

When it comes to the horror, the game mostly focuses on various chase sequences and loud jump scares. There was nothing special about it.

Visually, the game looks good for most parts, especially the environment. They used Unreal Engine's photogrammetry technology with 3D-scanned objects that looked really good. Some of the ghosts and enemies did not look as good unfortunately.

The sound design is really nothing special. No scary ominous music or so, just loud noises for the jump scares. I also thought it was really bad voice acting for Adam that made him sound like a big baby.

If we start with the story, it was perfectly fine, but way too predictable and too long. We figured out what was going on at the very beginning of the game, so the twist at the end was no surprise, and it was also the only twist. As I said before, the voice actor for Adam is also very bad, which ruins the immersion. Even some enemies sounded awful and strange, for example Norton, one of the bosses.

Much of what was done in the game could have been removed completely. For example, the Quantum Localizer parts when you play as Adam. These sequences were very boring and didn't really fit into the game in my opinion. Almost every chapter as Adam was boring. It was mostly running around looking for things, fixing some electricity, fetching stuff, and solving boring puzzles, with no enemies around and in daylight. Even the boss fights could have been removed as they were extremely poorly designed.

As for the setting and atmosphere, only chapter 2 was scary. Otherwise, the game is far too bright and you almost never need to use the lantern or the matches. When the game was over, we had over 120 matches and over 60 bottles of kerosene for the lantern. We also played on the hardest. So the horror parts of the game were a big disappointment and so was the difficulty.

I'm not a big fan of chase sequences that are scripted, and there are several of those in this game. It's all about trial and error. There is only one way that is correct to run, and I don't like it. I like when there are more possibilities, because it becomes more exciting then. I want to be able to trick the enemy and run and hide wherever I want.

As I said before, many sequences are far too long and boring. A good example when it comes to the horror part of the game is when you are in the mines. You will come to a place where there are several tunnels with Roman numerals to choose from. You'll find a clue that tells you which three tunnels to run through and in which order, while an enemy patrols the area. When you have run through all three tunnels, you will come to a new floor that looks exactly the same and you must do the same sequence again. So you do that and get to a third floor, then do the same sequence a third time! Why? All to make the game longer I guess. The swamp was also a lot of repetitiveness. Just tedious and stupid.

This game does not have the option to rebind keys either, they are hardcoded. We all play differently and me personally don't like crouching with C, I want LEFT CONTROL for that. Really bothered me. Lazy and stupid.

Overall, I cannot recommend this game. I've played much worse games, but this is still not good. The game would have been better if it was more concentrated and shorter. Instead, it just feels like the developers have taken ideas from other games and mixed everything together into a mess of several games. Both the Amnesia franchise and Resident Evil franchise are two of my favourite gaming franchises when it comes to horror. This game is so far from the same quality as those. In my opinion, The Beast Inside suffers from an identity crisis.

Alone with the dead... Embalm corpses, banish demons, save your soul.

You play as Rebecca Owens, who has just graduated from mortuary school. She gets a job at a haunted mortuary. The game is very short. Once you've learned the game, you can get through a night shift in 30 minutes, but before that it takes up to 1,5h maybe to complete a shift. However, you have to play several shifts to find out everything about the story, because the events that happen at the mortuary are random. The story was quite interesting.

The gameplay is all about embalming bodies. There are always 3 bodies per shift and one of them is possessed by a demon. You have to figure out which one is possessed and then burn the correct body. There is a whole procedure that you have to learn about this that I am not going to go into. Figure it out yourself, more fun that way, but remember not to take too long or you'll get possessed and lose. There is a gauge you can change in the settings called Haunt System Aggressiveness, which is the difficulty level. The more aggressive the gauge is set to, the less time you have to perform the shift before you get possessed.

The entire game takes place in the same place, the mortuary. Except when there are short temporary flashbacks that takes you to other places where you learn more about the story. These events have predetermined scares. The atmosphere at the mortuary is very well done. It really is an eerie atmosphere. The scares outside the story events are completely random.

The scares are really good though. They don't just consist of cheap jump scares where you are startled by a loud noise. There are also scares where you just see a ghost standing and looking at you through a window or behind a bookshelf, which really creeped me out. I was constantly tense and on guard while playing this game.

Me, my brother, and two friends played through the first shift of the game on a 100 inch projector screen with surround sound in a pitch black room. We really got the best horror experience you can get from this game.

Both the visual design and sound design are well made. The ghosts and the bodies really creeped me out many times. As I said before, it's not just cheap loud bangs that scare you. It can be unpleasant music or a voice whispering to you, and more.

There isn't much to complain about in this game. What was a bit annoying was when you have to control the gurney, because the mouse sensitivity changes and becomes very slow. Why I don't know. It's a minor thing though. The game is most unpleasant the first few shifts. After a while you have gone through all the major events and if you then get the same event the next shift you know what will happen which makes the game less scary. The game also gets a bit repetitive after a while as the gameplay is all about the procedure of embalming the bodies. I also found it very easy to identify which body that was possessed after a couple of shifts. I always guessed right. I tried a shift on the hardest difficulty and managed to embalm all the bodies but time ran out and I lost. That was the only time though. I played about 8 shifts total.

The Mortuary Assistant is a very good horror game that kept me interested for the first four shifts or so. Then it got a little repetitive. It's a very creepy and uncomfortable game when it's at its best though! If you're a fan of horror, I highly recommend this game, especially if it's on sale. Don't hesitate, buy!

除邪(CHUXIE) is a surreal first person horror shooting game developed using Unreal Engine 5. With the powerful capabilities of Unreal Engine 5, players will experience stunning realistic visual effects, smooth game controls, and intense battles with terrifying monsters.

You play as a paranormal investigator, and your job is to eliminate demons and their eggs to prevent the birth of powerful demons that can wreak havoc. The game took me 2,5h to complete.

The game features a body camera approach, with an open aiming system, which you need to get used to, not too bad though. There are only two weapons in the game, pistol and shotgun. The guns are nice to shoot and well made for a low budget game. The game has some bugs, but no game breaking bugs.

The surroundings and atmosphere are creepy enough. The game has three different levels, environments. Basement, hospital and then Panpan's forest area. Personally, I didn't think the last area was particularly scary. The game got less and less scary the longer you played. The scares are mostly cheap jump scares with loud noises. Some of them really scared me though.

The visuals are quite good at some things and less good at others. The surroundings are okay, but the demons and monsters are quite ugly, silly and poorly made. They scared me at first, but later they just looked stupid with all their different colors etc. Like the Swing Champion, wtf was that? Hilarious.

The sound design is nothing special and feels cheap.

除邪(CHUXIE) is a short but okay horror game, with some humor involved, that I recommend horror fans to try, especially if it's on sale. Not a game I will play again, but fun enough to play once.

From the depths of hell, climb chained to your friends through diverse worlds. Solo or co-op, try to reach the summit and discover what awaits you there...

The story in Chained Together is basically about escaping hell to free yourself from the chains.

In Chained Together you can play 1-4 players. I recommend 4 players to get the most frustrating and challenging experience, because that's where the fun is. Communication and synchronization are the keys to success. Sometimes it's enough for just one person to fail an obstacle, and then everyone else in the chain is pulled down. This is what makes the game so fun and exciting. You can pull eachother up, but it deteriorates you balance, so be careful. It took me and my friends 5 hours and 10 minutes to complete the entire game. The game was just the right length, because towards the end I started to get a little bored.

The surroundings are not very varied. You start in Hell and work your way up to the City, and then on up to Heaven. The game is fairly short, so not really any need for more variation either.

I don't have much to complain about except some puzzles and obstacles were used multiple times, which got a little boring and tedious at times. I also think that the game was a little too easy even though we were 4 players.

Overall, Chained Together is a fun co-op game to play with your friends that will test your patience and your relationship with your friends.

Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG rooted in Chinese mythology. You shall set out as the Destined One to venture into the challenges and marvels ahead, to uncover the obscured truth beneath the veil of a glorious legend from the past.

The story in Black Myth: Wukong can be confusing and difficult to follow if you are not prepared and know the lore. I did not know much, and felt pretty detached from the story. You need to pay close attention to what every NPC says along the way and exhaust all dialogue. The side quests with various NPCs you meet along the way can be very difficult to figure out what you need to do and when to do it without checking a guide on the internet. Sometimes if you progress the game too far without doing certain steps in a side quest, the quest will be forfeited without warning and you have to try again the next playthrough. You have no journal or similar to keep track of your quests either. This can be very annoying, and is a thing that I "dislike" with this game and other souls-games for that matter, even if it's a minor thing.

The combat in this game is kinda boring and doesn't get much better the further you go in the game. The game is very bad at informing you about how things work too, for example combos or certain items. The combat is very basic and there are not many combos. The combat is basically spam your light attack, until you build up enough focus points to do a heavy attack and dodge every now and then. Rinse and repeat. Very repetitive. I also don't think dodging works well in this game. I don't know how many times I felt like "that should have been a dodge or perfect dodge" but the monkey just didn't do what I wanted. Once you start spamming X for your combo, it's like the monkey is stuck in the combo somehow and you can't dodge. The hitbox in this game is also very bad, especially on some bosses. Imagine spamming your combo on a boss and not a single attack can hit it!

You also have some spells at your disposal, which don't always work so well. Let's say a spell takes 2 seconds to channel. If you get hit while channeling the spell, you are interrupted and it goes on full cooldown. It doesn't matter if you did 5% of the channeling or 95%. Full cooldown. Very annoying.

Transformation spells transform you temporarily into another creature with different attacks. Dodging in these forms was even worse. Most of the Transformations also have a very awkward attack pattern, so I did not use them much.

The Talent Tree is very boring if you ask me. I focused mostly on the Foundation part for more defense, health, stamina, etc. After that I was not tempted by much else in the tree. Many of the spell upgrades, additional attacks and other various upgrades felt quite boring and useless. Why is there, for example, a possibilty to upgrade your usual jump, so it consumes less stamina?

A lot of what you find in this game feels like pure garbage. Armor sets and Curios' have no fun effects and many feel terribly unnecessary. There aren't many weapons to choose from either. You can craft new upgrades to your weapons, giving you more Critical Hit Chance and Damage, but with each upgrade the weapon gets a new Effect as well. For example, a certain part of your light attack combo receives shock damage. If you like the effect that the new upgrade has, and then upgrade your weapon again to increase your Crit Chance and Damage, the previous effect will disappear and you will gain a new effect. If you want your previous effect, you have to live with much less damage instead, which is idiotic. Let's say upgrade 5 is max. What if you like the effect on the second upgrade of the weapon and want to play with that, but you can't because you will lose too much damage. Just imagine the difference in damage between upgrade 2 and 5. It's so stupidly designed.

The enemies in this game are very boring and feel more like a chore to get through. They are very tedious and are not much of a threat to the dumb monkey you are playing as. Many of them also has a lot of health and maybe even a shield. What usually happens is that you use your spells on them, burning your mana before a boss, because you can't be bothered to kill them slowly. You can pick up materials in the form of flowers, mushrooms, etc. Some of these are hidden enemies in the ground. They jump up and you have to kill them to get the material. They could have skipped this because it was very boring and tedious.

This game has 107 bosses. 107! The majority of the bosses are very boring and way too easy. Many bosses are poorly designed as well. That in conjunction with the dodge function and the bad hitbox made me very frustrated many times. Out of all 107 bosses, a maximum of 5 of them were fun. I beat almost all the bosses on the first try, some on the second try, and some on a few more tries. A lot of the bosses are flying around in the air and were impossible to hit and just extremely annoying. How fun is it to fight a boss that just goes up in the air that you can't hit, when you have no ranged attacks? Some bosses also have some extremely annoying and stupid attacks where, for example, they make a lot of whirlwinds that are hard to avoid. If you get hit by them, it triggers a 1 second cutscene of you being flung into the air. Why? Some of these things can be avoided IF you have a special item equipped, that you don't know of, because the game does not tell you. Some bosses also have several automatic cutscenes in the middle of the fight when you manage to remove a certain part of the boss's health. In the cutscene, you get pounded by the boss, which is meant to happen, but when the cutscene is over, you've lost a lot of health. Some bosses are also impossible to hit sometimes even if they are on the ground because the hitbox is so bad. Quality over quantity please.

The visuals in this game are very beautiful. The environment is varied through the 6 chapters, BUT. This game has a lot of invisible walls, which was extremely annoying. Many times it looks like you can go to a certain place, or jump up on a certain rock, but you can't. Later you come to a very large area with many paths and space to explore. Suddenly you can go to a lot of places. All this space to explore, for basically nothing. A lot of large, unnecessary areas which only made the game longer and more confusing. Then comes chapter 4, where a large part takes place in a very confusing cave with a vertical layout, with more invisible walls. The stupid thing is that there are times in the game when there are no invisible walls. An enemy will appear and knock you over the edge. What? No invisible walls protecting me now? Chapter 5 is more linear and straight forward and it is much clearer where you can and cannot. Chapter 6 is the shortest chapter but also the most open one. Designing the environment and surroundings this way makes the player very confused and has a hard time knowing where the boundaries of the map are. This created a continuous frustration throughout the game for me.

This game also suffers from long loading screens. It also suffers from FPS drops and short freeze lag during some boss fights. Very annoying.

Honestly, I don't understand how this game can have overwhelmingly 95% positive reviews. It's a beautiful game with an okay story if you know it, but otherwise, it's very mediocre. I've played a lot of other souls-like games like the Dark Souls series, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and more, and if I compare this game to those, then this game is not very good. There is a lot of room for improvement though if they make a sequel or another game. Too easy with too boring combat for my taste.

Push the button?

No spoilers here! Push the button!

This game is very short and so is this review. A brilliant and unique experience that only takes about 25 minutes. Try it! And don't give up!

The Corridor.

Uhm... A white corridor and an orange button?

Uhm... The sound of pushing the button?

Try it. Push the button. You will not regret pushing that button.

"Curse You, Bayle! I Hereby Vow! You Will Rue This Day! Behold, A True Drake Warrior! And I, Igon! Your Fear Made Flesh!"

THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS.

The story in Shadow of the Erdtree is good, but can be confusing and difficult to follow. You need to pay close attention to what every NPC says along the way and exhaust all dialogue, just like in the base game.

Same as the base game.

I'm sorry to say that the gameplay in this DLC is not flawless like in the base game and is a bit tedious sometimes, more on this later. Shadow of the Erdtree adds 70 New Weapons, 10 New Shields, 39 New Talismans, 14 New Sorceries, 28 New Incantations, 20 New Spirit Ashes, 25 New Ashes of War, 30 New Armor Sets and New Consumables & Craftables. So there are now even more builds and variations to try, increasing replayability even more.

There are a good variety of enemies and bosses in the DLC with varied attack patterns that you have to learn to dodge. Except for some bosses that are roaming the open world and make a return in almost every area. I think FromSoftware needs to take a chill pill when it comes to dragons, I was so tired of fighting dragons in every area of ​​the DLC. Some bosses are well made and some actually badly designed, which surprised me. And a few enemies gave me gray hair. More on this later.

Shadow of the Erdtree adds a whole new map, that is big. Just like the base game this world is extremely beautiful and stunning. Only FromSoftware can release a DLC, three times bigger and longer than any standard game and call it a DLC. It took me about 50 hours to explore everything and complete the DLC.

Through the DLC you can find Scadutree Fragments that you use at Sites of Grace to increase your Scadutree Blessing. The Scadutree Blessing will increase with each rank, increasing your attack and your damage negation stats. There are also Revered Spirit Ash to find to increase your Shadow Realm Blessing. This is basically the same but it's for your Spirit Ashes and Torrent. This is one of the most annoying parts of the DLC. Sometimes I got to a boss and did almost no damage at all and died very quickly. Then it hit me, that I must be too low in the Scadutree Blessing. Max rank is 20, and you can't do much until you are at least rank 5 in this. I was only rank 4 when I got to Rellana, and had missed some Fragments. This is just a tedious, annoying and unnecessary addition to the game. Now I'm forced to explore to find more of these fu*kers to even have a chance at the boss I'm stuck on. First you only need 1 Fragment to increase the first rank, then you need 2 Fragments for ranks 2-9, then 3 Fragments for rank 10-20. So there are a total of 50 Fragments to find. Sigh.

The world is unnecessarily large. Many large areas contains almost no items. Why? You ride around a very large area with your horse, only to find a body or two that holds some mediocre crafting material. You see a corpse and you think "Oh yeah! Loot! OH... It was only a Beast Liver." Why even put a crafting material on a lootable corpse that you can easily farm from killing animals that there are tons of in the open world? This happened way too often in the DLC. Disappointing.

The map/world is also very confusing, since the Shadow Realm has multiple layers and is more vertically designed and complicated than the base game, like WAY MORE. And you only have a single-layered map.

The Kindred of Rot enemies are back in the DLC and they come in greater numbers this time, which was horrible. Fighting one at a time is fine, but try fighting 3-6 at a time while they are shooting their Pest Threads incantation at you. It was impossible to survive, even if you were on your horse.

The Horned Warrior enemy with ice magic in Enir-Ilim was very annoying. He creates a large ice storm on a small rooftop while swinging his sword at you, which makes it impossible to dodge everything and killed me a few times. Just bullsh*t if you ask me.

The Ulcerated Tree Spirit makes a couple of returns. I hate those flying blobs of sh*t and they should not have been brought back.

Every time you enter a new area in the DLC, it either has a Ghostflame Dragon boss in the open or a Furnace Golem. Both of these fu*kers are tedious, boring and annoying to fight. Almost every dragon has the same moveset as the dragons from the base game or from Dark Souls 3. There's also an area called Jagged Peak which contains basically only dragons with 3 dragon bosses. It's fine to have an area with dragons, but why add dragons to every other area? The first boss in Jagged Peak is two dragons at the same time. But they also fight each other, but still. The other two bosses are more unique and more fun to fight, especially Bayle.

Furnace Golems are basically annoying Giants that can see you from like 10 miles away and have a very long range on their attacks and just will not leave you alone. You need to hit their legs a bunch of times while avoiding their huge AoE attacks. Eventually you will stagger it, it will NOT fall over, you need to stagger it AGAIN, then it falls to the ground and you can do a critical hit. It gets up and you have to do the process AGAIN to kill it. Some of them have armor on their legs, making your attacks do no damage. For them you need to craft a specific item to throw into them to kill them. This item requires a very limited ingredient to craft, THAT YOU CANNOT FARM. It also takes 3 of this item to kill ONE Golem. If you screw up, you can’t kill it because you are out of crafting materials for that playthrough. WHAT! Why do this?

And now to the final and most annoying and badly designed part of the DLC. The final boss. This guy had me tilted sideways all the way to oblivion. It feels like this was their thought:

Let's create the hardest boss we have ever made. We don't care if it's a fun boss to fight, or well designed, as long as it's THE hardest boss. We make it unreasonably difficult with a thousand different visual effects along with his attacks so you can't see what's happening, and it can also damage you. Then we also make one of his attacks a 3-combo attack where it is impossible to dodge the first or second attack in the combo depending on whether you try to dodge the first or second blow. So we add a new talisman to the game that "improves backstepping but increases damage taken" Then the players have to figure out that you have to use it to backstep the first attack, then directly dodge forward on the second swing, and then do a slightly delayed dodge on the third. Then we make his AI completely unpredictable and design it so that he can sometimes chain combos together so you have to dodge for an eternity until you die. Some attacks should also be very inconsistent to dodge and only work half of the time, like the AoE attack when he pulls you in.

Messmer was also hard, but he was well designed and you just have to learn his moveset and get good. This is not the case with this fu*ker. I wanted to kill him solo, but after dying more than 50 times, most of the time because of the bullsh*t design and unavoidable cheat attacks, I decided to cheat back and use my Mimic Tear Spirit Ash against him.

I was very surprised about how disappointed I was after completing this DLC. I thought it was going to be another masterpiece, but it's not. I wanna give this DLC one thumb up and one thumb down. Despite the flaws that this DLC has, it's still better than most souls-like games, but it's not better than the base game. I'm going to give this a thumbs up, but it's on the verge of being a thumbs down.

Rise, Tarnished, and be guided by grace to brandish the power of the Elden Ring and become an Elden Lord in the Lands Between.

The story in Elden Ring is good, but can be confusing and difficult to follow. You need to pay close attention to what every NPC says along the way and exhaust all dialogue.

Just like with every FromSoftware's souls games, the side quests with various NPCs you meet along the way can be very difficult to figure out what you need to do and when to do it without checking a guide on the internet. Sometimes if you progress the game too far without doing certain steps in a side quest, the quest will be forfeited without warning and you have to try again the next playthrough. You have no journal or similar to keep track of your quests either. This can be very annoying, and is one out of two things that I "dislike" with the souls-games, even if it's a minor thing.

This is the other thing I dislike with the souls games, especially in Elden Ring. You can summon another player to your world to help you on the path to the next boss, and after the boss is slain, the summoned player will be returned to his world. Then you can summon the same player again or another player in the next area if that player has reached that area in his world, and so on.

Because of the vastness of the world in Elden Ring, the player is given a horse to ride around with and explore the world. This is amazing, but not in Co-Op. The summoned player can NOT use his horse in another player's world. If you want to explore everything with a friend, you have to do it by running, and then you have to do it again in your friend's world. A little tedious if you ask me.

The combat in this game is flawless. Just like Dark Souls 3. If you fail and die over and over again, it's on you, not the game. You just have to practice and get better. There are tons of different builds in the game with so many weapons and spells to choose from, so replayability in this regard is nothing less than fantastic. There is a certain item you need to respec your character though, but you get a lot of them in just one playthrough. You can always make a new character instead if you would like.

There are a good variety of enemies and bosses in the game with varied attack patterns that you have to learn to dodge. Except for some bosses that are roaming the open world and make a return in almost every area. One boss that I don't like that you encounter several times is the Ulcerated Tree Spirit. It often flies up in the air and becomes difficult to keep track of with messed up camera angles. It's also hard to read its attacks, because it's basically just a flying blob of... something. Very annoying.

The world in this game is one of the best and most beautiful worlds I have ever seen in a video game. The exploration part of this game is insane and you just want to explore every corner of the map. I have never had a stronger sense of adventure in any other game. The variety in the world is very good and, well, just very varied. Each area looks different and is just completely stunning. This alone is 10/10 in rating. Well done.

I do not have much to say here, as the few negatives that exist in the game are heavily overshadowed by all the positives. Side quests and Co-Op play could be better, yes, but this game is still a masterpiece in my opinion. Especially if you play it and complete it solo without the help of others to carry you, which is a greater achievement than completing it in Co-Op after all.

If you like FromSoftware and their Dark Souls series, don't hesitate to play Elden Ring. It's basically Dark Souls 3 in an open world. I was completely blown away the first time I played through this game.

Discover the true meaning of fear in Alien: Isolation, a survival horror set in an atmosphere of constant dread and mortal danger.

The story in Alien: Isolation is based on the Alien film series, and takes place 15 years after the events of the first movie. You play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of the Alien 1979 movie protagonist Ellen Ripley. Your mission is to investigate the disappearance of your mother on the space station Sevastopol. The story is good and interesting, but it and the game are way too long. It took us 19 hours to finish the game on Hard.

The environment in the game is well done and is very similar to the movie(s). However, I think the game is way too bright. It would have been much scarier if it was darker when the alien lurks around the corner or in the ventilation.

Me, my brother, and two friends played through the game on a 100 inch projector screen with surround sound in a pitch black room. We really got the best horror experience you can get from this game. At first we were really scared and fascinated. The first 6-7 missions or the first 5 hours were really good and exciting, but after that we got more and more bored the more we played, because it was just repetition of the same thing for the rest of the game. As my brother said: It feels like the creators made a 4-5 hour game that they then copied and pasted five times just to make a longer game.

There are many variations of puzzles in the game in the form of minigames. These are very easy to complete and are not much of a challenge.

There are 3 different enemy types in the game. Without spoiling too much, these are: Aliens, Androids and Humans. Fighting, hiding, or running away from the Alien was the most fun part of the game, and maybe the least fun too. More about that later. But there are way too many parts of the game where you fight Androids, which really frustrated us. The game is called ALIEN ISOLATION and not ANDROID ISOLATION last time I checked. The combat was okay at best, since it can be very buggy.

The game looks very good, even though it’s from 2014. The sound is also very good, especially since you have to listen often to figure out where the alien is, even if you have a motion tracker. The sound of heavy footsteps of an alien running to catch you was well made and terrifyingly done.

The combat and the use of a few weapons got us very frustrated. The revolver is annoying to use, because you have to aim with it for about 3 seconds before the reticle becomes small and you can shoot properly. And then we have the pipe bomb... I have never in any game experienced a pipe bomb or bomb of any kind that is so inconsistent and unreliable when it comes to how much damage it does or its blast radius. Sometimes you can stand 10 meters away and throw it at an Alien and it kills you. Sometimes you throw it at the Alien when it is 1 meter away from you and you only lose 10% of your health when it explodes. Sometimes you can kill an android with 1 pipe bomb, but sometimes it takes 1 pipe bomb and 4 melee hits, etc. This was so annoying.

Flares are completely useless. We only used them the first hour or two before we got the flashlight. It's also supposed to work as a low-cost noise maker, but it never worked for us.

The AI ​​of the Alien is not fully scripted and is unpredictable, which made the game scarier, but it was not flawless. Sometimes you could trick the Alien into coming by having the Humans shoot at you, and it will come and kill them instead. Kinda cool, right? But sometimes 4 Humans could shoot at you and it never comes. Then you try to shoot back to kill them, and THEN the Alien comes and kills YOU instead. Uh, what? It is almost impossible to run away from the Alien. Once it sees you, you are dead, if you don't use necessary weapons or equipment, which you don't always have available. This became very frustrating, because many times there was nothing we could do to survive. Many times why you die is also because of poor level design. The environment is not made good enough for running and hiding from the Alien. Amnesia: The Bunker made all of this so much better.

As I said earlier, the game is too bright. You have flares, you have a flashlight, and even though we played on Hard we never ran out of those because they are practically useless. The game would have been so much more exciting and scary if you had to rely more on those items!

The Rewire consoles that you encounter every now and then were useless 90% of the time and could have been deleted from the game.

You unlock new torches as the game progresses. You can then backtrack to previous areas to use the correct torch to open previously locked doors. When you go to a locked door, it will then appear on your map, but you can't see on the map which torch you need to open that door, which makes backtracking very tedious later, because you won't remember and can't be arsed to run to that door on the map on the other side of the ship just to see that you don't have the correct torch yet.

The crafting system was unnecessarily convoluted. You must first bring up the menu for what you want to craft, then you must click on each material needed to craft that item, and then click craft. For an EMP Mine you have to click on 8 components, and then click craft item to make ONE. The menu goes down after each craft, so then you have to do every step all over again. You cannot choose how many you want to craft either, only one at a time.

(SPOILER ALERT)
Many parts of the game could have been cut down or removed completely to make the game shorter, better and more consistent. We were very disappointed at the part when you have to destroy the Alien nest. It was far too short and too simple. Big disappointment. This was in Mission 14, and there are 19 missions. This should have been even later in the game as a bigger and final fight. They should also have introduced the Alien much later and made the encounters with the Alien more interesting, unique, and terrifying and less encounters with the Alien overall. Also, less encounters with the Androids. Both of those parts just got very tedious the longer you play. Everything should have been less with this game. LESS IS MORE.

Overall, I just cannot recommend this game UNLESS you are a hardcore fan of the Alien franchise. Then I recommend you play it through once. The game is far too tedious and too long with the same events over and over again for about 19 hours. Honestly, I don't understand how this game can have a Very Positive rating on Steam. Maybe this game was groundbreaking for many people in 2014, but playing this game in 2024 did not impress me and my friends very much. Or maybe it is because of the story and the ties it has to the movies, because the story was the best part about the game. Amnesia: The Bunker is a somewhat similar game when it comes to how the monster behaves etc. But that game is so much better designed than this. I recommend you try that game instead.