Recent reviews by Reyos

The game is actually worse than the previous one, the challenge and arcade options are dumbed down and slimmer, no visible difference in game play, just where they show you the cabinet, which I am betting I am not the only one who doesn't actually care. The added selection would be great, if half the games weren't just ported over from the previous game (which had the same half the games ported over from the previous game) except this time they don't give you the tables you already own, they don't even seem to offer you any kind of discount on rebuying what you already have, probably because they are trying to push the service model, which is one of the worst things to happen to gaming...

Artificial difficulty is a bad thing. When you finally get the third part of the dagger The game tells you to head back to the spawn zone, and it starts killing you, a health drain so fast I had to use 4 heals within about half as many minutes, they also closed off the paths back out of the volcano, the one I did third on the run making me search for the one route that I assume was still open while my health was quickly draining. It probably would be easier if I had done them in a different order, it probably would be easier after more runs when I upgraded health and healing more, but it shouldn't soft lock you out so hard if you can get that far on an earlier run.

I played the original version of the game 34 hours and was probably most of the way through and just played about 2 hours of this version total.

I played the original on my laptop from 2017. That laptop had a GTX 1060 with 3gb vram, 32 gb of 2400mhz DDR4 ram, a 2.8Ghz I7 and a hard disk drive.

I just built myself a computer a week ago. My new desktop has a 3070 TI with 8gb of vram, 64gb of 3200mhz DDR4 ram, a 3.8ghz Ryzen 7 580X and WD Black M.2 SSDs. Every single thing in this system is several steps up from the aging laptop.

This new edition with performance "enhancements" runs far, FAR worse on my new, better computer than the original ran on that laptop when it came out.

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For those who say I don't meet recommended specs, I do. The two Nvidia cards they recommend are the GeForce RTX 2070 and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. My card is better or equal to the recommended RTX 2070 in every way and actually marginally better than the GTX 1080, even though the 1080 has more ram, it's GDDR5X and less performant than the GDDR6 in my RTX 3070 Ti, coupled with the lower clock speed on the GP102 processor in the 1080 compared to the GA104 in the RTX 3070 Ti, 2560 fewer cores, about 80% of the bandwidth, the RTX 3070 Ti is the overall stronger card. Which is probably why the GTX 1080 Ti is really only recommended for 1080p while the 3070 is still considered a decent card for 4k graphics.

It's better than 5 was in my opinion. Far Cry 5's hypnosis mechanic to advance the plot was one of the worst things I have ever seen in gaming however so it's a pretty low bar to clear.

The game doesn't seem to want to let you play stealth, like previous games in the series there are alarms that are meant to call in reinforcements, but even when you clear every enemy without tripping one, new enemies will just arrive/spawn in the base you're clearing, including one time where I was clearing a ship off the coast, did it silently without even being seen, no enemies left until suddenly... there were another half dozen of them on the boat.

The default controls are pretty terrible, for example other games, even other ubisoft games (Assassin's Creed), that have a vision and tagging system tend to have that system bound to the V key by default. What's V in this game? Why it's the key to instantly fire a volley from the PC's back mounted rocket launcher/mortar, instantly alerting every enemy for miles while I was trying to stealth my way through. Even when you want to use that weapon, you can't decide where to aim, trying to use it to take down an anti-air gun the rockets all tracked to soldiers, who shouldn't even be there since I spent the last ten minutes clearing the base with my sniper rifle.

The "amigos" are a cute animal companion thing, but it's far too easy to dismiss them and no way to undo it immediately as the animal runs off, because again the controls aren't very intuitive. Even when you have them they don't always work as they should, getting the dog to actually fetch items from downed enemies is like pulling teeth... from the gator.

The vehicle system is annoying, you can get any number of vehicles of different types, but only 4 of them can be customised, and you need to scan vehicles you find to get customisation options, except if you already have scanned one of that base vehicle then you can't scan it again and you have to drag it back to a base to get that vehicle's paint and interior color options.

You can shoot the drivers of land vehicles through the windows, but even with a sniper rifle with armor piercing rounds, you can't shoot through the glass protecting the pilot of a helicopter to take them out and make it crash (or even when the chopper has landed)

Edit to add:

Subtitles are done horribly. There's two settings, subtitles and sound subtitles, neither of them turn on subtitles for probably half the voice lines in the game, where you're not directly talking to an NPC but the NPC is talking. Does Ubisoft think the hard of hearing don't deserve to know what the npcs are talking about? Even the subtitles that are there are done badly, they aren't always in the right order, so the first half of what someone says shows up, the response shows up on screen, then the second half of that first person's line shows up.

They still kind of have that kidnap/capture the player character multiple times in this game. It's a horrible trope that Far Cry does far too often. Once is forgivable, but once the PC survives and escapes the first time, it's stupid to take them alive the second, and third, time.

It does what it says it does, it's great at benchmarking hardware, even lets you (or them) keep track of scores and compare to big data sets about systems to know where yours is and where it's lacking.

So why do I not recommend the software? The company's business model. If you buy it now, (particularly since it's on sale for CDN$11.24) you get everything, every single upgrade is included for the price. I got it on sale too, the December sale back in 2014 for CDN$5.59. I bought the Time Spy upgrade on sale too, in the December sale of 2017 for CDN$1.64. In total I paid CDN$7.23, but I don't own the Storage Benchmark (CDN$3.39), the Port Royal upgrade (CDN$3.39) or the Speed Way upgrade (CDN$5.69). In total the upgrades I don't have would cost CDN$12.47 to buy separetely now, more than the current sale price of the software including all three of them and the Time Spy upgrade I already own. Since I already own PCMark and VRMark I could even buy the whole package bundle for CDN$7.87 and just get these upgrades in the current sale at nearly half the price, just like I could if I didn't own any parts of 3dMark but had the other two.

I'm okay with paid DLC, even in non-game software, I'm not okay with them punishing existing owners by charging so much for that DLC but throwing it in for free for new buyers.

This is a great classic action RPG style game. The story is great, but it has a ton of side jokes (like the blue hedgehag boss that drops a gold ring and chilli dogs, or the bag of holding complaining about not being needed in game) The skill trees and mechanics of gameplay are great, though with multiple buttons to do the same thing, the tutorial is poorly written to give instructions on the harder way to do things (needing two right thumbs to press the right stick and hit one of the buttons, rather than instructing you to use the shoulder triggers that work the same way)

There's a fatal flaw in "you can recruit and play as anyone" kind of gameplay - when you make all the characters so interchangeable you need bad writing. Half of the time the PC responses in conversations barely make any sense, because they are just sound bytes used interchangeably with a dozen others, it breaks any kind of immersion the game builds through the story.

The controls are a pain too, which hack 'q' does seems dependant on some esoteric unknown factor, though usually it ends up being disable every time I want it to be remote control. Esc also changes from opening the game menu to exiting remote control, annoying when you are used to hitting it to pause games, doubly so since there is no easy way to reconnect to your deployed drone or bot already half way through wherever you were sending it.

The story would and could have been good, but their shift from a single player character to everyone's a player character hurts it so much, don't get it unless you can get a great sale.

Update:

I finished the main campaign and started playing the bloodlines expansion, and the problems get worse not better. The one twist in the campaign was good, though they kept jumping around with Cass's motivations in a terrible writing sort of way.

As for the expansion, it dials up a lot of the problems. Actually playing as a single character fixes the writing problems that came from the ability to have any conversation as any character, but the addition of robot enemies that can apparently see and shoot through walls completely ruins the "play your way" aspect of the game, just lost a mission twice because I sent in my drone, had it start a hacking sequence then hid it out of view but in hacking range, the new robot found me outside the restricted area, through 2 brick walls and started shooting, alerting all the other enemies to where I was hiding. I prefer to play games like this using stealth, this expansion completely ruined that. The changes to basic spiderbot functions between the two games (not counting upgrades) also forces you into a different playstyle, this expansion wants you to do things guns blazing.

The worst HoP I've played in a long time. No map, so moving between areas takes time. During the HoPs the found item animation takes a few seconds and can't be skipped or interrupted, meaning you need to wait for it to finish before you click the next item (and not realising this may make you think you found something wrong). The first HoP doesn't list items, just tells you to find "logical pairs" of items, meaning you have to not only figure out which things on screen can be clicked, you also have to figure out the specific logical connections the game wants, and there are many ways to logically connect pairs of the items. In another early puzzle you have to figure out they want you to use scissors to cut out a butterfly that's completely visible before 'finding' it. In a third puzzle you need to find a "blade" but the knife isn't what they want or the sword, it's the straightrazor. This is on top of the standard localisation and the regular multiple valid answers that HoPs have...

This one has a lot of the issues you see in HOPs, particularly those that were translated. Some items have very regional names, other times there are hidden object items that match multiple things (specific lightbulb on a string of lightbulbs). The script for the story has errors, there are many items that would work but you aren't allowed to use (can't use the pickaxe to hook an item out of reach under a log, have to get a different hook item and come back)

The story is great, the setting, the mechanics, everything about the game is wonderful and I'm eagerly waiting for a third game in the IP to come out, while playing the first two again for the 3rd (or possibly 4th or more) time.

Compared to the first almost everything is an improvement, though I preferred the old energy system (bar with variable costs to use things, not discrete batteries where everything cost one like in this sequel)