Recent reviews by Iriseon

Finite map with infinite resource nodes. Build intricate factories with the intent of bringing order to chaos only for it to devolve into a spiraling mess of overlapping conveyor belts and dead-end shipping containers. Good!

The art team worked hard. The rest hardly works as advertised.

I really wanted to like this game and got caught up in the hype. Perhaps, one day, this game will be completely overhauled and retooled into what it should have been at launch but, for now, the lack of customization options coupled with the superfluous loot is a disappointment. I don't want to collect heaps of garbage while looking like trash. What's the point of a huge immersive city if the only interactions are fighting braindead enemies, bumping into braindead npcs, or trading useless kitsch with kiosks?

Potemkin marketing hinted at Deus Ex but delivered a shell without a ghost. As a story, the game is okay. As a game, its clunky and depressing. As art, it looks great, but says very little. How very meta.

Maybe this is too harsh. Maybe Skyrim isn't much different in many ways. Maybe expectations were too high. Maybe this wouldn't have been an issue if the marketing didn't promise the moon. Maybe if last gen consoles were eliminated from the project the scope would have lived up to the potential. Maybe the technical problems and bugs left a stubborn stain that can be ignored in short bursts of beautiful immersion. Maybe.

Whatever, I'm just posting this review for the Steam Autumn Sale badge and still salty after pre-ordering based off of hype, expecting so much more than a looter shooter, despite all the broken rakes and rope ladders Geralt picked up in the past. The game was played on a Ryzen 3900x with an RTX 2070 Super running off a Samsung 970 EVO Plus m.2 SSD. At least it never crashed to desktop.

Best Soundtrack Award 2020. Jesper Kyd's best work until Hitman Contracts came out 5 months later.

The game stubbornly uses the inaccurate "realistic" spread shooting of the old Hitman games' Glacier Engine. Managing squad members is a gimmick that hasn't aged well. Graphics haven't aged particularly well either. Despite that, the broad story and atmosphere are great and the game is a nostalgic classic. I must have beaten this game 4 times and still have the CD but it is great to have it available on Steam to load up with minimal fuss.

The best immersive murdering sim. Much like Hitman 2016, the levels are large and overwhelming until you start to master the patterns and triggers of each sandbox. The game is fairly cpu intensive, yet stable, with many options to tweak based on core count.

The voice acting is well done with humorous npc banter, though ideally I would prefer region-specific languages with subtitles for realism. For sound effects the effort was made to simulate accurate acoustics that occasionally falls flat versus old solutions like EAX. Sometimes footsteps have the correct reverb in large spaces and background conversations seem to bounce off concrete walls appropriately, and other times audio effects like closing a container sounds far louder than it should while a nearby npc sounds muffled.

Fantastic visuals with some of the best reflection technology that isn't actual ray tracing. Lots of color and attention to detail in the level aesthetic. Even the older levels like Sapienza are enhanced versus Hitman 2016. Even now, while the new levels like Miami look great, I find myself being drawn back to the slightly enhanced levels of the last game, redoing the old challenges to accumulate more gear to add to 47's bag of tricks. There's tons of content in the form of challenges that award new tools which would have been paid dlc if most other game companies had been in charge.

Hitman 2 is a fun experience in finding ways to start scripted events and eventually breaking them down. The game rewards patience, stalking targets and eavesdropping, yet its even more fun to abruptly interrupt actions with unexpected fire alarms and throwing objects to rip the AI out of the pre-defined paths once you figure out the systems. It's not a quick pick up and play and blast through the levels to see the story type of game but more of a slow burn where you find the best ways to replay scenarios from different angles.

GTA V is a beautiful world full of ugly people.

The game engine runs well, the single player story is engaging, and the Rockstar Editor is a fairly versatile toy to play around with.

The online mode is a grindfest infected with hackers.

An amazing spectacle fighter with tons of replay value. Learn the rules of nature through nanomachines, son. There's no need to be familiar with Metal Gear's convoluted story to enjoy this one. Play it on hard, learn how to parry, and upgrade your moves as soon as possible.

First you'll cringe at Garrett's new voice. Then you'll wince at the new story. Then you blink, absorbing the visuals and trying to ignore the audio. Then you warm up to the game, starting to appreciate the reboot's new direction. Then you start to enjoy yourself, getting into the meat of the level designs and AI quirks. And then you facepalm, repeatedly, non-stop, forever, as the story erodes every last shred of goodwill, with cheese-bursting cutscenes about ghostly energy and Primals and megalomaniacal siblings unleashing cult members to change the world.

They could have scrapped the hub town, deleted the story, and just made ~10 large intricate sneaking levels, saving production money, and everything would have been fine, even without Garrett's old voice.

As a game, Thief is competent, even beautiful, and its apparent many people worked hard on it. Buy it on sale and get lost for a few weekends.

As a Thief branded game, its a disappointing mess, discarding old characters and methods for misguided AAA marketing ideas and can only be recommended for rubbernecking at the train wreck.

No Hammerites, no Pagans, no taffers. But plenty of expletive-laden spit-shined shlock.

Its a better Defense Grid now with co-op and without pesky air enemies mess up your maze. It has a bad habit of crashing, throwing up a bug report feedback form, and then the feedback form crashing....but the game is fun enough to start right back up for more.

Hitman Absolution is a great game. No, its not Blood Money, and the cheesy story and cutscenes are pure camp.. but the levels, gameplay, and graphics are fantastic. Agent 47 gets to run around in various disguises and replay every level multiple ways, trying to best friends and foes on a global leaderboard. One level has you in a courtroom where you can dress up as a policeman, a judge, or even the tin-foil hat defendent who damages garden gnomes. Another has you take down a massive wrestler by dressing up as a security guard to hit him from the balcony, or sneak in the arena as part of another wrestler's entourage, or just don a wrestling suit and get into an unfortunate quick-time event fight. Or forget all that and wear your default suit and chuck throwing weapons at all your targets.

Throwing weapons & leaderboards & Glacier Engine 2.0 > Blood Money

It's a straight old-school shooter. You run fast, get tons of explosive rocket launchers, bloody gibs fly everywhere, and doors require you to find key cards. Fast-paced, fairly hard, and fun.