Recent reviews by Hyperspeed1313

Elite: Dangerous is an incredibly realistic game that builds off of the amazing scale of our galaxy. You explore the galaxy and complete missions to upgrade your ship and become as rich as possible (or maybe you do something else). It's fairly easy if you put some time into it to become a super-well equipped player. That said, planetary landings and all of the exploration functionality are part of the Horizons update, which I haven't played. Also, the ship paintjobs cost a LOT of real world money (come on, Frontier, $20 just to not have the default paintjob?). As long as you don't mind the open-world setup and the lack of actual story, you'll enjoy this game. Pro Tip: Illegal missions are much better payout with almost no risk. Carrying illegal cargo may get you a tiny fine, but the payout even if you get caught is much better. When an illegal mission shows up, it's usually in your best financial interest to take it.

Like I said, I haven't played this game with Horizons installed, but it will add a LOT of functionality to the game that is missing from the base game. Buy the package, and then you circumvent the $20 for paint jobs. I'm glad Frontier finally realized that having us re-buy the game was a ♥♥♥♥ move and changed the payment model (read all about it in the rant below).

That said, everyone who owns the game right now has paid a LOT of money to get it, and now we're being told to shell out an additional $45 to Frontier for Horizons!!! That's plain ridiculous!!! We've already paid (most of us anyway) $45-$60 for this game, and now Horizons is set to double that payout. On top of that, people who buy a new copy of Elite Dangerous: Horizons get the base game Elite: Dangerous as part of the package!

Way to be a ♥♥♥♥ to the fanbase, Frontier. For those of you who haven't bought the game yet, WAIT until after the Horizons launch to get the combo for way less.

So as you can see, at one point, Frontier tried to ♥♥♥♥ us over. They may be trustworthy for the future of this game, but I don't know. That's up to you to decide. Because I bought the game back before Horizons, I coudn't afford Horizons, and it would still cost me $50 on top of the $60 I already spent back when the price was higher just to get the $60 game package you can get now. I won't be putting in anymore money to this game, but I'd recommend it if you want to enjoy a super-realistic space experience. The price is finally right.

A brilliantly developed story has you on your toes for what will be the next unfolding all the way to the end. While the gameplay isn't as action packed as some, the story will keep you wanting more. And as it says, this game does NOT hold your hand. You have to take the initative to look for the clues that help solve each mystery. And sometimes, those clues only appear for you once you need a reason to look for them, so backtracking is necessary.

Be prepared. This story will tear your heart apart right when you least expect it to. The ending will make you cry, so be prepared. Have a permission slip signed for your next feels-trip before riding.

**I played through on the Redux in Unreal 4 so my gameplay time doesn't show up here.

I have updated this review with content relating to the Early Access release. It is following the beta weekend review.

What do I think of Roller Coaster Tycoon World? I was hoping it would be great and wow everyone, but this game is never going to be ready by the posted release date, if the roller coaster module is anything to go by. In attempting to build a wooden roller coaster (simple enough, right?) I never once was able to complete a circuit with the train. The physics engine in this is horrible, and if I try to make a tight turn with banking, the only think i ever see is 'SLOPE TOO STEEP'. I think I hate this game. Absolutely hate it. I know the devs are desparate to make some money on this, but this game is not okay. Unless the second beta is better, I'm going to be one of many thousands who return their pre-release orders.

SO MANY DERAILMENTS!!! (literaly)

In my first experience with the now long-term beta of this game, I must say it's really in need of optimizations. As of right now, this game is still not ready for a full release (thank goodness they went EA if they HAD to release it now, but they could have waited...). So, how has the fourth installment of the Roller Coaster Tycoon franchise fared? Not as well as I'd hoped.

The Graphics
They're not bad, but they're not good either. Visually, they're very pleasing. However, the peeps are flat skins (clothing is not a separate layer) which is disillusioning. In addition, the feel of the ride textures leave the tiniest bit of nagging that something's missing. Overall, though, the graphics are actually very good to look at. BUT, good luck getting a good framerate even with a Titan. The game set my settings on high and I run a GTX 970. There is 1 setting above that which a single GTX 980 or Titan should be capable of running at 60 fps. For the graphics, to be honest, I'm surprised my computer couldn't run 60 fps.
There is a plus, though. Since the devs know framerate is bad, they went and added a tickbox that reduces the graphics demand in favor of a more playable framerate, so that you almost never dip below 20 fps. Almost. When building new things in a park that already is a bit crowded, you can dip down all the way to the 1-3 fps region.

Gameplay
Well, it definitely feels like a more open and controllable world than previous RCT games. Because nothing is stuck to the grid, a whole new variety of layout options become available. That said, because of the size of the park, a whole lot of creativity has been thrown out the window. It would take dozens of this park to fill the parks you built in RCT 1-3. This park is only big enough to house 1 large coaster or 2 smaller ones (what the ♥♥♥♥, right?), in addition to your arsenal of small rides needed to keep the less extreme peeps happy. Speaking of those peeps, the way they scream when on a ride is all at once, so you just have an occasional scream that hurts your ears instead of constant enjoyment from your peeps.

Building Tools
The path and stall building tools are fairly intuitive. With the freeform option, you draw in any direction you like. With the grid turned on, you can keep everything aligned to a coordinate system (perpendicular and parallel to the park entrance, mind you). With snap turned on (this will turn off grid, and vice versa), you can place your paths at 90 degree angles to each other, even if they're not on the grid angle. It also allows for a few other things, like placing stalls directly onto existing paths, and more controllably placing trees and other objects adjacent to paths. All in all, having the three building modes is very useful, but I would like a localized grid aligned with a path I just drew if I had both grid and snap enabled. That would be very useful.

Specific Building Tools:
The path building tool - While this tool is great for building paths on the ground, you don't have nearly enough control with the path height. The only interval for heigh is 7 feet, which is too much, especially given the small spacing the grid has.
The Flat Ride Building Tool - Well, it's just placement and angle rotation. On the other hand, unlike in previous RCT games, you can't choose the locations for the entrance and exit to the ride, which was part of how we were able to tightly pack tons of rides into a small space in the last games. And given how much smaller this game's parks are, we really need as much control of the arrangement as possible.
Roller Coaster Building Tool - The roller coaster building tool really isn't bad anymore. Unlike in the beta weekend, coasters no longer crash for no reason, and the tool is relatively intuitive. That said, the station platforms are very sparse in selection and have MASSIVE footprints. There's already a significant queue and a horrendously long exit walk for every single station platform. And you can't pick where the entrance and/or exit come from, or the direction of the train. Also, track banking doesn't actually listen to what you say. For example, if I have a tight turn on an incline with steep banking, the track is actually rendered as flat and level. Decrease the banking, and the track banks outward (why?). Most of the time, using the building tools is fairly intutive. You have pre-built segments that you can adjust the scale of, or you can click on the ground away from nodes and build your own track. Working with nodes is intutive, but not getting to node mode. If you make a mistake, I have no clue how to abort the new piece without quitting the editor entirely. But on the plus side, you can create and delete nodes in the middle of the track without disconnecting it all. Overall, it still needs a bit of work, but coasters don't crash for no reason, and using it is largely intutive.

This game is labeled appropriately as something that's in Early Access. It's glitchy somewhat, and some of the controls don't feel quite finished. That said, there are other problems with this game. Flat rides don't have configurable exits, roller coaster stations are massive and just as unconfigurable (and lacking in variety), and the park size is WAY TOO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TINY! Will Atari and Nvizzio Creations pull it all together? Maybe. I wouldn't put any money on it happening this year. I would LOVE for them to pull it together and give us something amazing as though they've been holding out, but it really doesn't seem like RCT is on top any more. Planet Coaster, even being in alpha, is already incredibly customizable, allowing for every building to be custom made, a huge park size, and lots more detail. On top of that they're the brains behind RCT3 who did a very good job for the first 3D implementation of the series(no offense, Nvizzio). I expect a lot more from Planet Coaster in the near and far future than I do from Roller Coaster Tycoon World. For now, I'm getting my refund.

Perhaps one of the best games I've played in a long while. The pure simplicity of gaming with code and the challenge of exploiting every last detail. I'll admit, there are a couple of things that become necessities to complete, but you can end up not doing them. For the most part though, this game is just astoundingly good. The story is exciting and mysterious and would be fun for anyone. Even if you have no experience with coding, I can guarantee you'll understand how this game works in a couple of hours at most. -10/0 would definitely hack again.

I do have one complaint though... The game is very simple in UI and flat in layout, so in theory, it should run on ANY modern computer with no problem. However, a laptop in the default power plan will always be experiencing lag on the input. It needs optimizations.

This game has some great tech in it with the collision physics, but nothing else about it really feels worth your time once you get to grips with the engine. The experience is extremely hollow, with almost no NPCs and the few that exist all out to kill you.

Essentially there is either sandbox, or sandbox where you have to get the materials before you build. There are no objectives to this game which makes for a serious lack of direction. I've watched this game develop ever since it first entered Early Access and it still hasn't evolved past the sandbox and into the sandbox-survival genere it really needs to be for all this cool tech to be worth it. If you want to build stuff in space then wreck it, this might be worth $5-$10 for you. For anyone looking for a survival game, Empyrion is a better game. For anyone looking to unleash their creativity in space, Empyrion is still a better platform in every way except physics, though you'll have to mind the less impressive graphics.

The story mode is a quite long, well written tale of three men who decide to set themselves up for life by getting into the high stakes crime game. It's better than any previous GTA game, and if you enjoyed previous GTA games, why haven't you bought it yet? The only complaints I have are with the way some of the cheats are implemented, or missing (that were in previous GTA games), but those are all secondary issues really quite irrelevant to enjoying this game.

As an extremely open-world game, GTA V is second to none. This is both the cause of its success and of its downfall. Because it's so open world, GTA V is a technical masterpiece of engine optimization and gameplay opportunity options. However, there's so many different things to do that you know you'll never actually 100% the game without resorting to mods. It may be heresy to say this, but GTA V is just too big for its own good. Now, if you're not a completionist (and I envy you if you're not), you'll be able to enjoy GTA V much more easily than me and I absolutely recommend that you buy it.

Story Mode - Worth the buy

GTA Online was good enough when the game launched, but it's gotten to be pretty terrible for the average, unmodded player nowadays. I absolutely do not recommend Online mode anymore.

The first and most visibly annoying issue in GTA Online is the amount of players (many of them with mods) who do not heistate to ruin your day, killing you time and time again as you struggle to grind for a measly $10k or so. With all the DLC vehicles, Online has become so unbalanced that some players just quit out of sheer inability to play the game without being repeatedly slaughtered. I almost always put myself in a solo-public session by suspending GTA5.exe from Windows Resource Monitor for about 10 seconds to avoid this exact plague.

Back when GTA V was new, within the first year or two of its nextgen/PC release, online mode was a massive community and was really quite enjoyable to play with. There was only a single incentive to get money for: a high-end apartment for heists. The jobs didn't pay out quite as much as the newer modes do, but with only one thing to save up for, that wasn't really a problem. Every other purchase just made the gameplay more fun.

Since then, Take Two have discovered that their Shark Cards (microtransactions for GTA Online $) are extremely profitable. With that discovery, they altered the course of GTA Online to become pure, painful grind. Every DLC expansion that has come since, while free to download, is in no way free to play. With almost no exception, each GTA Online expansion has cost more in-game currency than the last to buy into, meaning you spend more time grinding than ever before.

In the early days of GTA Online, a single of the most expensive Shark Card ($100 when not on sale) would fetch you $8,000,000 in-game, more than enough to buy almost everything in the Online mode. Years later, the Shark Card still costs the same, and still gives you the same amount of in-game currency, but that $8m in-game is worth so much less. Here's a list of some purchases you can make in GTA Online today (all USD are based on $100 USD/$8m in-game). While all of them can be purchased with in-game currency without spending a penny, the grind to get that much money is tens or even hundreds of hours, and Take Two expects you to buy Shark Cards to buy some of this stuff:

1. Office: A necessary purchase to enter the special-cargo business, vehicle import/export business, or special vehicle missions. The base office cost ranges from $1m-$4m ($12.50-$50 USD), with almost purely cosmetic upgrades that can total up to $2.65m (~$33 USD) on top of that.

2. Bunker: to get into the gunrunning business, you need a bunker. Typically placed far north of Los Santos, they slowly manufacture weapons cargo you can sell. The base bunker costs between $1.165m and $2.375m depending on location, though the cheapest bunker is an absolutely terrible buy as the drive to/from it is almost as bad of a grind as the special cargo missions. Personalization options for bunkers can total $1.695m. Part of weapon manufacturing is buying/stealing supplies which can total $75,000 for a full bunker. If your bunker isn't upgraded (separate from the personalization purchases, upgrades cost over $2.1m/~$26 USD total), the net payout from buying supplies then selling them to Los Santos (for an additional 50% payout) is exactly $0. And to add insult to injury you need to pay $4700 in fees every 40 minutes to keep the bunker running. So the only way to make the bunker profitable while paying minimum price is to do horribly painful grindy missions with excessively OP'd AI trying to kill you.

3. Cars, Boats, and Planes: In the early days of GTA Online, the most expensive cars were all less than $1m. Now some individual cars cost as much as $2.7m (or ~$34 USD). The current most-expensive plane is $5.9m (~$74 USD), and the community all agrees that it's actually complete garbage. And the Lazer fighter jet is coming on-sale soon for $6m ($75 USD), and it's beaten in every way by the Hydra, a plane that costs 1/2 as much. The tugboat (while not the most expensive at $1.25m ($~16 USD) was absolutely terrible, being unable to take even the slightest explosion and having a top speed of 2.

4. Warehouses: Cargo warehouses are necessary to do special cargo missions and can range from $250k for the cheapest small warehouse up to $3.5m (~$44 USD) for the most expensive large one. Vehicle warehouses cost $1.5m up to $2.85m (~$36 USD), with cosmetic upgrades of almost $300k additionally.

5. Yachts: Yes, you can buy a yacht. Cost ranges from $6m to $8m ($75-$100 USD) depending on which base yacht you buy, with cosmetic upgrades totaling $2m additionally ($25 USD). And these yachts are almost completely useless for gameplay. They're just there to look cool. Yes, that's right, you can look cool in a video game for the low, low cost of up to $125 USD: REAL WORLD CURRENCY.

I ended up logging about 100 hours in GTA Online in the past month or two, but I'm done. I'm completely done, never coming back to Online, and I've already uninstalled the game for this reason: GTA Online has become a PC equivalent of a mobile app. You don't realize it at first, but playing GTA Online is exactly like playing Candy Crush Saga (or any of King's other games that should go die in hell). You get in, understand the gameplay, and think things are in reach. Before long, you're playing hours on-end for a single achievement that actually isn't worth much at all, or your're shelling out a good chunk of real-world currency to get the unlocks in any sort of timely manner. And regardless of whether or not you realize it, GTA Online is an addiction. It's been designed over the years to become the most effective moneymaking machine Take Two could lay claim to, and engineered to ensure players keep playing even when they're not actually having fun anymore. I finally woke up to what this game has been doing to my life, and now that I'm aware of it they won't keep me playing anymore.

GTA Online is not fun. It's a grind that's been engineered to be addictive and strip your life and/or wallet away from you, all for the sake of Take Two making more money. If you buy this game, buy it for the single player only. Don't let Take Two get you with the online. You'll regret it when you wake up.

I love a driving game, and I love realism, but this is not a game. It's a simulator. How is it a simulator and not a game? It has a career....?

Firstly, the XBOX controller support is poor. If you want an axis-based control mapped to a button (i.e. clutch), you're screwed. And vice versa (i.e. camera look). None of the menus support controller navigation and there is no optimal configuration.

Secondly, there's no music library to add fun to driving in the program. No background tracks meant to improve the experience, catered for the buyers to enjoy.

Thirdly, some of the stuff doesn't work. The driving lines that are meant to tell you the best way to drive for a fast time are very often wrong, and by disobeying the lines, you can shave several seconds off your time on even a small circuit.

Assetto Corsa had the possibility to be what Gran Turismo and Forsa Motorsport are for consoles, but it fell short by JUST trying to be a simulator.

This game has a very simple purpose: to be a puzzle game from a small time developer working on their own. Does it work? To a point, maybe. It does have some things that challenge you to think for a minute, but there's nothing really challenging about the puzzles themselves. The only challenge is that sometimes your character won't move in the right way, and that's something out of our control. Does it satisfy my puzzle addiction in the way Portal did? Not a chance. This is way more obvious than Portal. This is more of a skill game than a puzzle game.

So far I've played three and a half levels, and there isn't really anything that makes me want to keep playing. The story is almost nonexistent and there's no soundtrack to keep you fixed to the objective. Really, I was expecting at least SOME storyline to this game, but I can't find enough of one to enjoy this game.

END GAME:
Now that I've finished the game I can write a full review on it. The gameplay is largely repetetive with little in the way of new puzzles or new terrain styles. The objective is sometimes very difficult to see and even harder to reach. The difficulty of this game is for well-skilled gamers, which conflicts with the story. The story is something really best suited for a kid in single digits, and most kids that age don't have the skills necessary to complete this game. More than that, most kids that age play on consoles and not Steam.

Probably the most brain-bending game I've ever played. It doesn't have the same puzzle-like design of Portal, but it bends your brain in so many other ways that I don't care.

P.S. the ending makes the whole game worth it

P.P.S. Be prepared to get frustrated over things of significance that actually have no significance. The devs are evil sometimes.