Recent reviews by Fang

"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to stop modding or I'll ban you... also pay us 80$ for the privilege.".

- James Bond Villain Strauss Zelnick.

Terms of Service:
• Mods are a bannable offense
• Display of Cheats/Exploits is bannable
• Forced arbitration clause and a waiver of class action and jury trial rights for all users residing in the United States and any other territory other than Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, or The Territories of The European Economic Area
• You can be banned for using a VPN while connecting to online servers
• Cannot access game content on a Virtual PC

Collected Data Types:
• Identifiers / Contact Information: Name, user name, gamertag, postal and email address, phone number, unique IDs, mobile device ID, platform ID, gaming service ID, advertising ID (IDFA, Android ID) and IP address

THIS LONG WAR BE TAKING TOO LONG MAN

BY AZURA BY AZURA BY AZURA!!! it's Oblivion Remastered! I can't believe it's here! Being sold here in front of me!

W game by an L publisher.

The developers cooked at least. Far less UBI-BS, and the few parts that are there (like a skins shop) can be completely ignored. Resources? You'll be literally drowning in thousands of them before you've even completed 25% of the map even if you're lazy with exploring.

Fun combat, great setting, awesome characters (Yasuke is a chad, f*ck the chuds), and one of the better plots in the series even if it's not beating AC2 on that front. Also very minimal interruptions by the horrible modern-day crap.

Generally speaking I like the game. It's Total War. The setting is cool, the visuals are impressive, and there's a lot of game for your buck. The civil war mechanics are simple but add some progression outside of just conquering everyone around you.
Becoming King/Pharaoh/Emperor is when you get to play around with some really overpowered stuff like just outright annexing small nations against their will and stacking the court with your own generals without any negative consequences. Pretty fun, even if most of the mechanics eventually become set-it-and-forget-it. Picking your own gods is cool, but after maxing them out, which is very easy to do, you no longer have to interact with the mechanic at all. Same with the court after you become King/Pharaoh/Emperor as you are too powerful for enemy schemes to really harm you.

The return of a family tree is a welcome addition that should be in any TW game in the future that isn't based off a fantasy IP like Warhammer. Can we bring back more things from the old TW games like Rome 1 and Medieval 2? That would be a good idea. There's a reason the series took off with those games.

I do have several issues with it that really grind my gears:

1: Battles are the worst they've ever been. No dedicated cavalry units for most factions means it's just endless infantry and archer slugging matches. Spearmen might aswell not even exist as they have very little purpose. Lines either break instantly or refuse to break at all. No in-between. They are boring to play, boring to watch, and there's no variety from one battle to the next. Chariots are crap and not a fitting substitute. Troy fixed this by introducing myth units to spice things up and man, this game could use some of that.

2: "Court dilemma" mechanics bug. Lots of people mention it. Having to reload a quicksave every 15 turns so you can use the court again is stupid and should've been fixed months ago. It's been a complaint for about 5 months now and seems to have been introduced with an update.

3: Performance on the campaign map drops to a crawl after an hour or two of playing. Only restarting the game fixes it. No, I have 32GB of RAM. Again, mentioned by many others. Menus will take seconds to open, and scrolling the map becomes a chug-fest. Ironically in-battle performance is flawless which is very rare in this series.

4. Patented Benny-Hill-Theme-Philosophy modern TW AI where all they do is run away from you and only attack you where they outnumber you 10-to-1. CA thinks that makes for good gameplay apparently, ever since the first Warhammer. The horde factions are the worst offenders of this.

5. Auto-resolve has been nerfed to the point where even full-stack armies can barely achieve a pyrrhic victory against city garrisons. Which wouldn't be a problem if we weren't still stuck on this system where even large endgame nations can only field a mere 4-5 armies without bankrupting themselves or resorting to tier-1 unit spams.

I am recommending this game on the fact that you can easily spend dozens of hours playing every campaign and there is a big sandbox to play around with here. A HUGE shame on them for not fixing the critical bugs before abandoning it, however.

It's fantastic. The Zone looks absolutely gorgeous. Revisiting familiar locations from the first three games in Unreal 5 is a real treat (Rostok made me feel right at home). Anomalies look awesome with the new effects. Artifacts are still as alluring as ever and it truly feels worthwhile to hunt them down. The classic mutant line-up remains harrowing to encounter, though they are a bit too bullet-spongey by default; fortunately the modding scene is already picking up so this and many other little problems can easily be fixed!

It has a lot of bugs. You can get softlocked with some borked quests - even some main quests. It has performance issues. A-Life (dynamic zone) complaints are true. It is not a bad idea to wait for a few updates before jumping in, but it's damn worth it no matter when you do so.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a worthy sequel and a 'must play'!

I managed to fix my crashing issues so far. Reached the capital (35 FPS on the city square lmao) but at least the game works.

But I will not be changing my review to positive until they vastly improve this PC port. It's an utterly unacceptable release state.

As for the Microtransactions, I have a little story that I want you to read and consider:

"What does it matter if they exist if they aren’t needed? Some people with disposable income and lack of time may want to buy them. They aren’t required."

They aren't required, because you get plenty of resources, yet people with disposable income are buying them? ... ... Huh?

The reason they are in ALONG WITH ANTI-CHEAT FUNCTIONALITY (that only targets the locally running game on your PC, not the online servers), is to normalize their inclusion in your 70-100+ currency priced SP games.

There is no magical unicorn audience that desires these microtransactions because they want them.

The only two camps are: "They are meaningless!" and "They shouldn't be in in the first place!". So who are they for then? What idiot wants to spend money to beat his singleplayer open-world game faster?

*Stares at Dragon's Dogma 2*
Okay HellDivers 2, maybe I've been too hard on you.


Matchmaking still doesn't work properly, and the latest patch introduced more crashing issues with Arc weaponry, but they've communicated a patch is coming next week (at time of writing) to fix this issue.

And the gameplay is still fun and never crashes outside the above.

It's not perfect (balance is still all over the place) but I've got tons of fun out of it and likely will even more. So it's a slightly-hesitant recommendation at this point.

IT BEARS THE HEAD OF A C0CK!

Baldur's Gate 3 deserves all the love it has already received and more. The finest RPG of 2023!