Recent reviews by Niotex

One of the best shooters I've played in years. Even in it's current EA state it's one of the most engaging and refreshing takes on the "boomer shooter" genre in a while. Environments are dense with a lot of interesting detail/secrets that reward you for exploring. Environmental interaction and the sheer amount of mayhem you can unleash onto your screen is incredibly satisfying. Enemy AI is surprisingly sophisticated and given the chance they'll surprise you, causing you to actually change gears a bit. This isn't a complete run and gun, especially at the higher difficulties, you have to be smart about engagements.

Looking forward to future updates and chapters!

I am a simple man. You give me a super shotgun, an ocean of blood, a soundtrack to match and I'm happy.

Paid for with salty Dota 2 items. Jumping from 1 salt-mine into the next!

Bar none the best VR game I've played in the last 3 years. It's a no-brainer for anyone who has a VR headset. Just get it if you have the opportunity to play it.

Beat Saber is such a simple concept, yet it works so well that it almost transcends the medium. That sounds rather overkill, but it's really something that needs to be experienced. In short it has simple yet slick presentation, some great tracks (albeit a low number) and a great modding community that transforms this into an absolute must have for anyone with a VR headset.

A short but sweet mod that's absolutely oozing with atmosphere and great gameplay. Give it a go if you have a spare 30 minutes or so. Satisfaction guarenteed!

Ori and the Blind Forest is a 2D "Metroidvania" type game that boasts absolutely beautiful art, an endearing story and exhilaratingly tight challenging gameplay.

From the moment you start you'll be dragged in by it's visual style, every frame looking more picturesque than the last. From the way everything moves and reacts to player to the immaculate attention to detail in the smallest of nooks and crannies. And those nooks and crannies is what it's all about, as it wouldn't be a Metroidvania without a healthy dose of secrets and collectibles. Finding these can often times be tricky but also incredibly fun and rewarding due to incredible level design coupled with fun and tight traversal gameplay. Always challenging but never unfair Ori manages to strike a near perfect balance throughout the roughly 8 hour experiance on first playthrough. Completionists and speedrunners will find even more value in subsequent playthroughs.

I can not recommend this one enough, truly a wonderful experience that you can't afford to miss out on.

Mind: Path to Thalamus is a visually stunning yet fairly straight forward exploration puzzler that has a rather literal take on it's title. The journey you'll undertake is that of a self loathing father working through his issues within his own mind. It's canvas ranging from symbolic manifestations of emotional issues to elaborate and stylistic visual representations of the brain. All of this accompanied by your characters poor attempt at a meaningful monologue. This is where Mind: Path to Thalamus falls short, it's narrative and it's presentation of it. The voice over is so jarring that it pulls you completely out of the otherwise beautiful visual journey. It breaks the narrative in such a way that it feels like nothing more than a college freshman's attempt at writting about life without any personal experience with anything related to the subject matter.

If the visuals intrest you, get it when it's on sale. If you're looking for a narrative masterpiece you're better off looking elsewhere.

You awaken in a prison cell, hollowed and stripped of all humanity. You are an Undead, a cursed being trapped within the purgatory that is the Undead Asylum. Who you are and what brought you here are a mystery. The curse makes one forget it seems. As you break out of your cell messages written with soapstone start to appear. Slowly you will make your way through the Asylum, heeding the cautionary tales written by those who came before you. You will seek comfort in the warm embrace of the bonfire, an oasis amidst the rubble and death. Before long however, you will be faced with insurmountable odds in the form of the Asylum Demon. This is where you will most likely die. However death isn't the end of things, you're an Undead after all. Soon you'll feel the warm embrace of the bonfire once more. At this point you will try again, again and again. Until at long last you slay the beast and are liberated from this place. This is where Dark Souls starts and your journey begins.

That journey will be beautiful and engaging. The world you'll explore, the characters you'll meet are all lovingly crafted and will stick with you until long after. The gameplay is brutally unforgiving and exceptionally rewarding. Every bit of progress you'll make in this game will be a personal victory. It is incredibly captivating, challenging and simply put fun. If you are looking for a lengthy hands off narrative with compelling, tense action orientated D&D style gameplay. Then do yourself a favor, pick this game up and praise the sun!

That being said, it is not without it's faults. The port of this game is sloppy to say the least. Natively it runs at sub par resolutions and has it's gamelogic locked at 30fps. This means that out of the box this game is practically unplayable for most PC gamers. Luckily there are ways to fix these glaring issues in the form of DSFix. (V2.4 at the time of this writing) It is a third party injector created for Dark Souls Prepare To Die Edition that enables you to alter render settings at the engine level.

All in all I can not recommend Dark Souls enough.

Praise the sun!

Gone home is an exploration game in which you explore your families new home after being gone for some time. Upon arrival something seems amiss and thus you begin to "investigate". What the game ends up boiling down to is finding journal notes or directions that move the narrative forward. Ultimately not really giving any sense of free will or enabling you to do much other than the aforementioned rummaging for notes. The main focus here is the narrative, which while not exceptionally lengthy or original it is oddly compelling. As a whole though there really isn't much here beyond that. Frankly due to it's abysmal completion time of 1 hour, it's hard to recommend unless it's on sale.