Recent reviews by Ciradis

A great game for Jeep™ owners, fans and the general public alike. Only in Far Cry® 2 can you drive classic Jeep™ automobiles such as the Jeep™ Wrangler, a staple of many an african safari. Jeep™, drive fresh.

I'm someone who's regretted buying games in this series every time I decided to give it another shot since fifa 13 which is personally what up to now I considered to be the last good fifa, and this one feels nearly as fun and predominantly skill based playing fifa 12/13 again - this is easily the best (not)fifa release in over a decade

They also actually bothered to update the career mode this time around (and no, I don't mean just adding new UI cluttering sub-menus or reskinning player attribute trackers)

If you can cope with the sheer aggravation of having to nanny your teammate AI like someone put toddlers at the helm of a mech, this game's not too far shy of being perfect for what it is. Or if you have friends to coop with, that too

Every single time I come back to check the new content in this game i'm reminded why I uninstalled it in the first place

It's so realistic that it's not fun, however when it can't be bothered to be realistic you get blatantly unrealistic mechanics like being able to respawn call of duty style in specific missions, therefor it is neither committed to being realistic nor fun

A little more than 50% of any play session is waiting for your ship to agonisingly slowly reach a point of interest/station/planet/whatever because 'muh physics simulation'

Almost all space combat is based on either having a team of people with you or having a meta ship (good luck getting one of those in under 40 hours of pure grinding), as some NPC ships tank is nearly unbreakable without exploiting a meta or just ramming your own ship into them and praying - the accepted working strategy is unironically that you fire at a ship once to aggro it, then just let the AI police do most of the damage for you if you're a solo

The MMO-style multiplayer component is essentially just the vietnam war if the vietnamese were role players and the americans were griefers, just an in-game money sink to even be involved in (since it's completely optional and has no effect on in game rewards whatsoever)

All ground missions of substance are pretty much either A. call of duty domination mode with respawns or B. Extremely slow paced stealth mission where the instant you break stealth there's a 50-50 chance you end up in a 10v1 whilst trapped in a room smaller than an apartment, complete with only one long hallway exit to make your attempts at brute-forcing an escape impossible and in which if you die, the game forcibly teleports you to another system altogether

Every objective based mission that involves space combat is more or less "go to this shooting gallery, shoot ships belonging to specific faction, maybe ♥♥♥♥ with a freighter or scan some ♥♥♥♥ if you don't die" and can take hours to complete for absolutely pathetic rewards - it seems that according to elite dangerous, the minimum wage after we've perfected space travel will be the equivalent of $2.40 an hour

Apart from that you've got exploring and trading, with the former of the two being the decent experience for the pure reason that it can throw some serious scares at you if you're not staying completely alert - trading is literally just 'google this, fly there, buy/sell that'

Oh, and there's mining too, but you don't *really* want to park in front of an asteroid and fire a laser at it all day... Do you?

In summary: this game boiled down is a near 1:1 emulation of being a loser stuck in a dead end, minimum wage job after inflation has risen to 40%, but it's in space so I guess that means it's 'fun' now, huh?

The menu/UI's are truly atrocious and consistently a chore to navigate, but the positive updates to the gameplay manage to save this from being a 'no'

Fantastic. Alot of effort seems to have gone into this remake, and considering how abysmal the 2024 gaming landscape is, bloober team deserve a gold medal each, if you ask me. I play on hard combat/light puzzle difficulty and find:

Positives:
- Performance is stable 60 fps at all high but shaders medium/1080p, even on my PC that just edges past the recommended reqs (2080ti, i7 9700k), about what i'd expect for a PC that i've had for 4(+) years now
- The Mouse/Keyboard controls are competently laid out by default, responsive and easy to use, there is no need to use a controller like Steam will suggest as you first launch the game
- The game seems to have been thoroughly tested, I have not experienced a single bug or crash in 4 hours of play (and still have not now at 11 hours!)
- Graphics are fantastic, resembling Alan Wake 2
- Story is faithful, key changes are acknowledged through flashbacks and recreated in a way that is modern, but is sincere to the source material
- Combat is modernised, but fluid, requiring you to study each enemy and understand the best times to cease attempting to continue melee'ing them and avoid damage
- The remake, more often than not, feels like i'm playing an updated version of the original Silent Hill 2 than an overtly modernised remake of the established standard set by it

Negatives:
- Some scenes are unnecessarily censored, e.g. the pyramid head x mannequin scene is, unless otherwise stated, seems purely cut for modern sensitivity reasons
- Health items seem to be gifted extremely frequently comparatively to the difficulty of the modernised combat, even for me who plays with combat on hard - however, this may turn out to be a red herring intended to create a false sense of security for mid/late game
- The i-frame relative combat can sometimes create unimmersive scenes in which dodging directly toward an enemy successfully avoids their attack despite the fact that you've smothered your face against them (i-frame meaning 'period of invulnerability' in simple terms), lending to the game feeling more 'arcade' than 'horror' at times - as you're far from lacking in defensive capabilities in some scenes/versus certain enemies
- Character facial expressions in alot of cutscenes range from 'cartoonishly over-acted' to 'alien trying to emulate human behavior', quite egregiously poor - however this is not the case with every cutscene, just too many not to begin to notice
- Certain puzzles are more just overt guessing games that punish you for not trial-and-error'ing your way past them; one such example requires you to conceptually understand safe cracking, as there is so little guidance on how to complete the section such that someone who did not might not even consider cracking the lock as an option

People exclaiming that the 'game is woke' due to some character model changes seem to be, in this case, completely knee-jerk reacting to none-issues. Angela; she's quite far from being 'ugly' as is the common mantra of Silent Hill 2 remake bashers. I recognise that opinions like these are indeed subjective, but I don't see any changes to any character so far that I could refer to as being in the name of ideologues.

Whilst I will agree that alot of games these days seem to be egregious in their attempts to conform to some ideology, this one you have to really be reaching to claim is actively pushing that into the fore.

Kinda plays like a scooby doo mystery with a protagonist that has bipolar intelligence levels

I said zoinks a few times and was genuinely terrified twice

At some point in the game you'll get the feeling the lead writer literally stopped showing up to work and the devs had to hire a stand-in, but it's decent and pretty funny I guess

More like texas BOREDER guard, this game doesn't even have the kind of aliens real texans like me have to deal with every day.

It becomes so easy after reaching a certain level that everything dies from you giving it a stern look, but it's good until that point.

Not really worth full price, and whichever dev tried to imply that travelling is fun in this game obviously didn't play long enough to reach a higher level than 23 or so.