Recent reviews by Phleet

i made a donut, i made an animated donut, it went backwards. now my house is donuts and my walls are painted with icing. please send a carpenter. or a baker. i'm not sure what to do about this

can't connect to private match with preset 9-10 group of friends, unable to authenticate (including my android copy using a separate account)

HZD on PC has had the expected growing pains, and still continues to. I'm growing inclined to believe HZD's PR team's claims that they're actually working on fixing the game as the majority of my concerns have been eased, they haven't been solved outright but all things considered it's about par for the course. i'm still hesitant to say i would recommend this game on PC, but at 140h with less crashes per hour than Stardew Valley, Terraria, Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Monster Hunter: World or FFXIV, i think i've got to admit that it's stable enough to recommend.

all told, mileage may vary. don't forget Steam can occasionally revoke your DRM rights to your games (effectively denying you the right to play the game you purchased legitimately as it's now technically pirated in steam's system), so that's always an accepted risk :/

If you have an AMD B450 Motherboard (Ryzen CPU), this game may not run properly for you. See below for my specs and reasoning

Needs some work, the optimization is genuinely awful. my hardware should comfortably run this at 1080p 60fps according to their recommended specs and settings, i'm closer to 40 FPS with lots of stuttering, flickering, artifacts, etc.

EDIT: As of 2020/09/01, I still can't quite recommend the game but I can't quite not either. If there was an option to "meh" the game, I would probably use that.

The game itself hasn't really been changed, as I had hoped. The game itself is still a great game, however most users seem to be reporting that they simply cannot run the game due to crashes, patches and updates, or worse, poor performance to the point the game is genuinely unplayable.

EDIT: However, as of the recent patch, much of the major issues that would prevent you from playing are claimed to be fixed, as well as some nice flavor items like snow deformation.
A notable example being your Slow-Time-Down skill called Concentration, and often the other similar skills "Slow time while Sliding/jumping" would no longer work on your save-game. This issue should be fixed, however I have never had this issue myself so I can't attest to that.
I can attest however, that my performance is a much more stable 50 FPS where earlier it would juggle between 15-60. Yes, my higher end is lower now, but my lower end is much higher. I consider this "less worse."

I have had performance issues, the game barely using my GPU, and adding to that the control scheme isn't horrible but using the controls is horrible. You might be looting a corpse while holding W with the intent of sprinting away as soon as the looting is finished, but the game does not register that you are holding W because you are locked in a different menu which has its own control scheme. That brings me to my complaint on controls, every menu(looting, inventory, open world exploration, combat) and interactive mode has its own separate control scheme. This makes playing the game more akin to switching control profiles with a cheap 3rd party software like Logitech G HUB. Yes, it works, but it can be delayed and buggy, and often doesn't accept new input until it finishes changing profiles.

This is a shame as I would love to recommend this game, but unfortunately I cannot. If you have a PS4, you will have a more enjoyable time with this game right now.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600
AMD RX Vega 56 8g
AMD B450M Pro M2 motherboard (fastest PCIe 3.0 lane only supports up to x8 bandwidth. This game requires x16 due to their console-oriented thought process, if the youtube comments are to be believed in the below linked video)
16g dual channel ram(3200mhz)

Requires janky edits to PCIe bandwidth, external driver-enforced postprocessing tweaks(as opposed to fiddling with ingame graphics settings) and most graphics options above medium are not optimized at all, next to no graphical improvement for the massive FPS hit you will take.

Video for Reference, timestamped at recommended optimum specs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w-pZm7Zay4&t=632s

I would write a more comprehensive review for Dishonored 2, but it's been a good minute since I last played it. I don't have much memory of this game. I do have a few notable notes.

Corvo's voice actor, I can't unhear Belethor/Lucian from Skyrim. Every time Corvo speaks, I can't not laugh. This isn't the game's fault, he does a good job voicing Corvo the assassin.

Powers: they're great, but I'm a hoarder. I don't like using HP/MP potions unless I absolutely have to, so I tend to play very slow, very quiet, and very cautiously. This makes the powers all feel wasteful, too high investment for the reward, not powerful enough, or too noisy.

The powers themselves do feel good, and sound good, and look good. I just personally don't feel like they're worth using.

Weapons: Sword/dagger(used like a dagger, size of a sword). Mobility/magic. The combat does feel good, you feel like a badass deflecting arrows or dodging shots. I play stealth low chaos, so I rarely use any weapons. The game is very forgiving of someone that plays like me.

Level Design: ... The levels are pretty, but often there doesn't seem to be a safe or hidden pathway that gives enough visibility to understand the layout of a map. When I infiltrate anywhere in a game, I like to get a view of the overall layout, then get into the trenches to get a feel for the patterns.

This game often gives blind spots, it can break stealth and feel unfair because of these blind spots... or this can be a good thing for you, if you consider it a way to make stealth more interesting.

Why do I not recommend you buy this game?
DRM, long and short of it. There's a lot of background information floating around about how evil DRM is already. If and when there are DRM-free, legal alternatives to buy a game I highly recommend you seek it out. GoG(Good old Games) and Humble Bundle often do good work on this front. Consider making accounts with those sites, they do more than market and publish games, GOG gives the game company a better cut, and humble bundle donates portions of proceeds to certain charities.

Because it's a background process that your game has to run to mark it as legally obtained, it usually demands you to be Always Online, even when it's a single player game.

Being a background process, it uses a little bit of your computer processing power. For example, most Ubisoft games use between 85-95% CPU resources on a 6-core machine (AMD FX 6300). When I play most any game with no DRM, it only uses 20-40% CPU capacity depending on amount of mods installed if any, and the type of game it is.

This might be an AMD problem in that case because the referenced CPU is actually just a 3 core, 6 thread CPU but every manual and marketing piece I can find calls it a 6 core machine.

Disabled in my library. Google says it's because the game is pirated. I had purchased my steam copy legitimately through steam, so make of that what you will. Consider DRM free alternatives, Humble Bundle, GoG, whatever you can find.

Updated Review:
To add some substance to my review about the game itself, rather than DRM related or publisher related beef. For reference, I started my playthrough on the maximum available difficulty. Halfway through the first open-world map segment, I had to lower difficulty to Normal. It was still a hair-pulling adventure, let me explain why below.

The setting of the game is beautiful, I will admit. Grand vistas, pretty shanty towns, I think they used color well. The wasteland feels like a living wasteland.

Difficulty and AI
Difficulty seems to only chonk up the armor, damage, frequency of chippable armor pieces existing on fodder enemies. I think it also affects their aim to a degree. I had to turn down my difficulty due to 3 main problems.

Approaching and infiltrating/assaulting an enemy base would lose too much HP from any distance.
With no way to recover or protect your health this becomes a very slow fight uphill where you just sit behind a wall while the AI either surrounds you and overwhelms you or worse, they just sit behind cover huckin' grenades and rockets at you until you finally give.

That's two problems in one, you get very few tools for breathing room or health recovery. You also have very few ways to protect yourself. At the start of the game

My third problem, this game seems to be tuned like a typical Bethesda game, Fallout 4, TES:IV Oblivion come to mind. It seems you're expected to start the game on or below Normal until you unlock more guns, more gun upgrades, and more powers.

By the halfway mark of the game I had to crank my difficulty back up to max because it was too easy, too boring. Even at max difficulty it felt too easy because of the Power combos/rotation I will talk about later.

The Tutorial: Where am I, what is shooting me
The game plops you into the fray in the tutorial. First you select male or female protagonist(this doesn't effect gameplay in any way), I appreciate the choice.
You are immediately sent into the fray, given a gun and some live targets to learn the game against. Smoke screens everywhere, explosions, grenades, flying projectiles, and it seems that every enemy AI is more aware of you than they are of your horde of AI comrades.

The controls aren't really problematic, the aiming is comfortable, the guns feel good and they have decent impact.

The main problem here is information overflow. They spam you with popups that freeze the game and interrupt your train of thought while you are moving into cover from the onslaught of grenades, rockets and assault rifles getting thrown at you. This also stops your movement momentum.
Most of my deaths in the tutorial were from sprinting to cover, getting a popup, then trying to sprint to cover as soon as my popup closes.


Guns: lots of guns, not a bad start.
The good: they shoot good, they sound good, they look good.

The bad: enemy AI is mostly not projectiles from my memory, and when they are projectiles, there is an aggressive firing squad lined up to pop your melon. Their accuracy and deviance, control of their weapons, it's all too much for me. I've had plenty fun on Nightmare in Doom 2016, and Doom Eternal. Hordes and projectiles aren't a huge problem for me as long as I can feasibly game them to avoid them.

Powers
A lot of powers that feel natural to use and chain together, sometimes it feels like you're some kind of hack and slash badass.
The good: they look, feel and sound good in a lot of ways. Impact, ragdolls, mobility, it kind of feels like Doomfist on drugs.

The bad: it feels forceful in a similar way to Doom Eternal's rock-paper-shotgun, you're almost expected to use your mobility attacks in a specific pattern that feels more like an MMORPG rotation than a shooter with utilities.
This is probably more my own hangup than the game's 'cause what I want from this is OP utilities for powers, if I get to have a super punch, I want to be Saitama. If I get to have superhero landing groundslams, I want it to shatter the earth. Visually, it does, and there's a knockdown effect, but it does little damage.

Story: There is one
The good: I remember liking the acting and voice actors, I remember feeling invested in the story.

The bad: Open world. It's another open world game, I was craving this kind of game when I bought it and it delivered in spades. Unfortunately they stop feeling unique, they stop feeling interesting. It's a big empty world with pockets of instances where you rinse-repeat your way through hordes.





And for the original review that triggered me enough to post in the first place, this resolved itself "same-day." I posted this review nearing midnight just before I went to bed, by the time I woke up, Steam had resolved this issue. It turned out to be a DRM-related issue. As such my advice in it, I believe, is still valid. Consider a DRM-free alternative.

Original review:
Looks like it's not just Doom Eternal, Doom 2016 and Dishonored 2. RAGE2 is being marked as an illegitimate key too, the game has been disabled in my library. Play just redirects to the store page demanding I buy a copy. Doubly amusing because it won't let me buy on account of it already being in my library. Do not buy, consider alternatives. I recommend DRM Free alternatives, GoG and Humble Bundle usually do good work on that front

Do I recommend this game? Yes.
Do I recommend you buy this game? Yes.
Why do I not recommend this game in my review? DRM, see the spoiler at the bottom for what spawned this review from me.
Is the issue resolved? Yes*

Guns
Shotgun: you can shoot grenades, or burst-shots like a battlerifle
Pistol: ...
Heavy Assault Rifle: har har har. Sniper rifle mode, and rocket-volley mode.
Plasma Rifle: Basically a submachine gun with a shotgun or stun grenade underbarrel attachment.
Minigun: Flaming bullets, or double barrels, take your pick.
Rocket Launcher: you can shoot rockets that explode before they explode, but then still explode, or you can shoot 3 rockets at once.
BFG: almost as cool as the next gun on the list
Super Shotgun: This is a godmode item you unlock halfway through the game, with full upgrades this thing is just a delete-button for demons.

Gun and Character Upgrades
The game rewards you for exploring levels to find secrets. Every secret you find gives you either Suit upgrade points, or weapon upgrade points. Spend these to max out your gear, ammo, armor, health, or weapon attachments.

Got all the attachments for a weapon? complete an optional challenge to unlock a Mastery upgrade.

Badassery
Do you want to explode a demon with buckshot? Rockets? Bullet hell? Plasma? Your own bloodied fists? This game is for you.

Level Design
The levels get kinda samey-same, but I still think they are all beautifully designed, beautifully detailed, and sell the feel of the game. It's a very grungey Doom, compared to Doom Eternal's arcadey, colorful, shoot-a-demon.





What was that about DRM at the start?
I do recommend you buy this game, this is a fun game and I think no one should miss out on a good shooter experience.

However, as outlined below, Steam made a booboo. The DRM had disabled a lot of my games, mostly Bethesda games. Apparently it also affected other games. This is the price we pay, this is what we agree to when we buy DRM protected games.

DRM is a protection/security method by which publishers protect their game from piracy. Often this requires an Online-Only state, even for "Single-Player Only" titles.
Often this is a secondary background process that can lock out 5, 10, 20, 40% of your CPU resources, or maybe even GPU resources.
DRM often has a direct effect on your game/computer performance during the game, lower FPS, input lag, and hardware depending it can cause stutters.
This is the accepted risk.

My advice stands. If there are legal DRM-Free options for a game, I highly recommend you seek them out. Humble Bundle, GoG, they usually do good work here.


Game is marked as pirated or something now, won't launch. Redirects to store page. Purchased legitimately through steam. Not the only game this happened to, seems only Bethesda titles so far. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Dishonored 2... Do not buy, it seems the keys might be illegitimate, or maybe it's just a glitch. I can't be sure. Consider alternative methods, GoG, Humble Bundle, if you're willing to gamble on doxxing yourself you could even consider directly buying from Bethesda.

eh, i've got a couple hours in it, now... it's alright, i guess. just stay out of limsa and the beehive.

tl;dr: you play this game for the survival/crafter/builder/explorer gameplay, not the story. story's kinda neat i guess.

much more basebuilding potential than the first iteration
much more hostile creatures but they follow the same general rules of engagement as the first iteration, namely nothing will one-shot you, and everything makes itself known through sound.

sound design is kinda borked, i noticed pinnacrids, a passive herbivore you can ride sounds like it's as threatening as a Reaper Leviathan, but this game is still in early access and for what it is i'm still enjoying it.

Edit: sound design's still pretty borked. my main complaint is the ambient sounds in the arctic spires regions, the screeches the cryptosuchus' give out sounding more threatening than the chelicerate, squid shark and shadow leviathan combined.

the story's different from the first iteration, you're not a lone survivor stranded on a remote, uncharted alien planet under alien quarantine. you're a field researcher that got stranded in a storm with your only point of contact to the outside world being your sister up in a space station.

Edit: the story's kinda borked this time around. they redid the story basically from the ground up. i'm not a huge fan of the main character's ... well character. she's a bit of a mary sue if i'm even using that correctly, and while i do generally agree with her lines in-game, they feel forced and unearned. it's as if this character grew up watching every kids show with a moral lesson and memorized them rote. i imagine much of the story's been spoiled by promo content or other reviewers, so mainly my complaint is how she constantly lectures the alien about what makes humans human

the gameplay loop is the same as the first iteration, starts off much grindier, but resources quickly become plentiful. i feel like they're really pushing and incentivizing basebuilding with this iteration. we even get big fancy new rooms, glass cielings for our main multipurpose/large multipurpose rooms, alien containment aquariums scale up to match the new Large Room size. it's a nice addition, i just wish we had that bad in Subnautica, and more i wish there was a larger map with less purpose and more sandboxy stuff to do. ideally with co-op to build bases with a buddy, buuuut honestly this game's not really built for that kind of thing, isolation really sets the mood here.

my favorite addition to Below Zero is honestly the Pin Recipe function. so you can see what you need to gather while in other menus or out gathering. i realize the Cyclops has no place here(it literally won't fit), but i preferred the cyclops where i could attach my own fabricator, bed, planters, storage lockers etc. to the interior. the Seatruck is a nice way to make the game feel more immersive and natural, but it also feels restrictive now that i've tasted the power of the Cyclops

all in all, it's still a work in progress, i haven't had a playthrough yet that wasn't full of bugs or minor polish problems but the beauty of it is that they still offer their F8-to-report system from the first game. i would recommend you get the first game since it's a finished product before buying this, but i would recommend this to anyone that liked subnautica and wants to support the devs here.

Guns: yes
Guns good?: this game plays more like a rock-paper-shotgun, the higher the difficulty you play the more the game punishes you for not playing to a guns' strengths.

I find this great, in 2016 I fought every fight with just the Super Shotgun and chainsaw. Occasionally I used the Minigun for the big boys, or the gauss rifle to snipe cacodemons.

The new system makes and lets me use all my gun, very fun.
From what I've seen of twitch streamers and journalists, this is not fun for most people.

Upgrades: lots
Upgrades any good?: Maybe? I hear a lot of people find the upgrade system confusing as there are many different upgrade systems.

Gun upgrades: you unlock these the same way in 2016, slay demons good, finish optional objectives, etc, earn upgrade points, spend them on guns.

Gun Mastery Upgrades: do a challenge, or find an end-game reward to skip the challenge.


Seraph Crystals: These are your new Argent Energy cells. Every Crystal you pick lets you pick from +Ammo capacity, +Armor, +HP, same as 2016.

Seraph Upgrades: These are attained by unlocking 2 Seraph Crystal upgrades that are connected. The UI will make it obvious enough by showing the Seraph Upgrade between 2 Crystal brackets.
This part can be confusing, and often annoying because you want ammo or armor, but to get your Upgrade you need to pick Health(or any combination of this)

Story: /shrug i dunno, it has one. All I know is there's hordes of demons to slay, and they are fun to fight.

Cutscenes: Mostly skippable cutscenes, my only complaint is that often you'll hold the skip-cutscene button too long and accidentally waste a charge of Flame Belch which is a minor annoyance. Flame Belch recharges over time like a regular cooldown, it's not a gauge to fill like Ultimates in Overwatch, it's more like standard cooldowns from Overwatch.


Edit: so this issue below has been resolved, it turned out to be a DRM related issue. I don't use twitter actively so I didn't get the memo. As such, my review for Doom Eternal will not be a "do not buy," instead it will be a "do not buy here, if you can avoid it."

Game was marked as pirated in my library, along with a couple other Bethesda specific titles. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal and Dishonored 2 all refuse to launch and redirect me to their respective store pages. I strongly recommend you buy this from a reputable shop or at least DRM free.

GoG, Humble Bundle, and even direct from Bethesda will be your safest bets, though with Bethesda it's admittedly a crapshoot. Last time I heard about people giving Bethesda purchase and/or identifying information, the data was all plaintext and worse than that it was on display for everyone to see without any technical knowledge.

I have enough reasons not to want to support Bethesda, I don't need more. Restore my game keys.

can't remember if i got this as a gift, or if i just spaced out while i bought it. i think it was a gift.

best 30 dollars i ever spent. don't think, just do it.