Recent reviews by Issah

If you enjoyed Hades you'll enjoy Hades 2. The Soundtrack kicks ass, the game feels awesome to play, and especially importantly, it never feels cheap when I get smashed. Looking forward to spending many hours in this game, like I did the first.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but with scalies. The worldbuilding is quite interesting and it feels very good to play it, most importantly. Very much still in production but there's enough meat on these bones to entertain for hours. If you like Stalker but wouldn't mind a low-poly style, with slightly faster gameplay, this is worth a try!

The game definitely has rough edges. Tons of them in fact. At time of writing there is a UI bug that causes the regular HUD to not appear as and when it should. A padlock and the ESC key saying "Quit" next to it.
Despite this though, the experience is there, the soul is at home in this game, though I am missing a few things I was used to coming from the Anomaly GAMMA modpack. That said this game very solid.

The immersion hits right away, the weather is menacing. Though I have yet to see a proper blowout.
Music is excellent, both the ambient and action music as well as the stuff you can hear blaring out of a radio from someplace you pass by or enter.

It needs a bit of technical polish, still. But in time I expect this game to be solid. Maybe even moddable, which would make this game even more long lived.

I've had to edit my review for this game due to the circumstances of Season 2's launch.
It's a massive travesty, honestly. I fell in love with this game despite its faults at the outset, but now it has become blatantly obvious that the devs want a game that completely sacrifices character identity and depth of gameplay for "easier gameplay"

In this case, that being said in terse derisiveness. I'm all for accessibility and ease of 'picking up' but Tekken has always stood out by virtue of its gameplay depth. This is completely tossed to the wayside in favor of doing what boils down to erasing character identity by giving them all 'all the tools'. Balancing has historically been good. Despite characters having widely different strengths and weaknesses, anyone could win with any character, granted they had the experience and know-how to win. At one point you would stop fighting the character, and instead fight the player piloting that characters. Leading to huge mind-games and high levels of player expression.

That's all gone now though, because any character can do anything and all have access to levels of in-your-face pressure that decides matches from the first frame of the fight.
What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, Bamco. You suck.

Ace Combat has never been about realism. Let's be honest, enemy planes can literally turn on a dime and infuriatingly break away from tracking weapons with ease whenever it suits them. No airframe should be able to handle what this game does to them, but that isn't the point. Ace Combat has always been about telling a story in a strange world where aerial combat is akin to arturian legends about epic clashings of steel and magic. It seeks to make you feel like a hero, and by god does it pull it off. At worst you'll be evading missiles and taking pot shots at targets, at its best you are the razor that cuts the sky, and every target falls to pieces in your wake in glorious fireballs. All while sweeping music blasts in your ears, mixing with the constant threat of "MISSILE" blaring in your hud.

The story will always be a subjective thing, and Ace Combat has never been without a healthy helping of cheese, but it's oh so charming. You'll grow attached to your fellow pilots, and you'll grow to laugh at, and swear at both them and your enemies.
The DLC missions for this game are some of the finest pieces of gameplay the series has ever seen.
My recently passed grandfather introduced me to this series with Air Combat and AC 3, an airforce man himself with flight hours in an F-16C. He'd have loved to play this game. Rest in peace old man.

My first TM game was TM Original, and it is with a callback release to honor that past that inspired me to write something about this game.
This one is for you kids who used to go out with your hot-wheels and other toy cars, building ramps, pretending to wallride them on locker doors and your sibling's head, no doubt.
Maybe you built loops, expansive multi-day project tracks that spanned whole rooms or basements. Wishing you could sit in that car and see it first hand. To experience going 500 kph riding a wall, flying through the air, or hell, going straight underwater.
To you guys who think regular racing is kinda not quite "it" for you because sim racing is too regimented and straight-edge. This racer is arcadey no doubt about that. But boy does it have depth. It features tons of tricks and knowledge-checks that you either learn intuitively, or you learn about it by watching replays, or youtube videos. You'll learn to hunt for just another decimal of a millisecond faster than either yourself, or that other guy you've been leapfrogging records with.
You learn something about yourself playing this game.

This captures the feeling of the older BF games. The graphics are simple, but the game feels fantastic to play. It can only go up from here, really.

Yeah the main story of this DLC was not great. It feels like something happened during the writing part of this DLC that just tuned it a bit hack'y I suppose. The post-game story and missions really do start to answer questions left after the campaign ends, but it's kinda frustrating that the story itself seems to serve mostly as a Strand tutorial with someone narrating a justification for learning it on top of that.

Anyway, that was the most negative part and I guess the thing most people will see this as and never stick around to experience the gameplay of it all. Bungie, for all their faults, did a fantastic job with re-balancing the game for this DLC. Strand feels amazing, easily the best integrated subclass to come out and it feels fully baked, as opposed to Stasis.

There were much more complaints about everything 'but' the story in The Witch Queen. I feel like this DLC is diametrically opposite of that. It's a rough landing but a death knell it isn't.

I have just in the past few days (before the EAC "security" update was announced) spent several hundred bucks on this game, finally diving into the fun that is Full body tracking, upgraded headset accessories, and mods. Mods are by and large for the benefit of users who need Quality of life changes that the Devs are too slow to implement themselves.<
Chiefly among them are accessibility options for people with physical impairments and more options for managing others' presence to avoid harassers and facilitating better menu options for people that need to recline or lie down and play.

The justification for this shoehorning of an update, is "safety" to ward off malicious actors, crasher, avatar rippers etc. however, this update will do nothing to stop them, and the only people hurt by the update are the well meaning ones that are at this point running this game better than the devs are.

Without mods this game has a myriad of security issues already that EaC will not fix, performance is poor even on high-end rigs, something mods can help alleviate. With this update all you'll have left is the vanilla game with no ready-to-deploy replacements from the workshop or any kind of whitelist functionality.

Vrchat devs don't care, they want money. Move on over to ChilloutVr or NeosVr.

A fun game with tons of potential for both humor and varied gameplay.
However the spread between good and bad runs is extreme. Bomb builds are very strong, and you are very reliant on the rng of the pegboard to do any significant damage. As it is currently, there needs to be buffs to the weakest relics and orbs.

I both love and hate the RNG that comes with the pegboards. Certain orbs just don't bounce well, or you almost feel like the game is conspiring against you to make every shot as unoptimized as possible. Other times though, it goes entirely the other direction.

As it is at time of writing, balance needs to be a focus. Some more player agency to influence the worst runs, and buffs to the weakest orbs and relics.