Recent reviews by TJGM

I finally got around to playing the original Half-Life last year and it definitely lived up to it’s legacy.

Great levels, fun gameplay which still feels and plays well, amazing soundtrack and a lot of nice details, but still one or two nit-picks, let’s discuss.

Spoiler free, even for a game this old. Played at the hardest difficulty.

The story is intriguing and fairly simple.

Zero cutscenes means you learn what’s going on through dialogue from NPCs as you play as well as tons of environmental storytelling.

Possibly the first game of its kind in that sense, and it does an amazing job.

By the end of the game, the main story definitely starts to pick up and you’re left desperately wanting to know more about what exactly is going on.

The gameplay is one of the best parts of Half Life.

Combat is fun, with fantastic enemy variation ranging from human soldiers armed with guns and grenades, to flying and massive aliens.

The AI feels very smart for the time, with CQB enemies pushing your position and ranged enemies taking shots and repositioning frequently to keep you on your toes.

Weapons in the game are very satisfying to use and range from the iconic crossbar, to a pistol all the way to a heat seeking rocket launcher.

Every weapon feels like it has a place regularly during combat and you really need to take your ammo into consideration when playing.

Is it really worth using up a rocket on a medium sized enemy to kill them a bit quicker, when you might need it for an even bigger enemy later in the level?

Sure you might replenish your ammo, but it’s not always guaranteed. This type of gameplay keeps you thinking and always wanting to explore to stock up on as much as you can.

I believe ammo is tied to difficulty, and I really enjoyed this aspect of the game at the hardest difficulty.

The gameplay is also broken up with plenty of different puzzles or once off environment interactions.

I won’t lie, some of them I found quite difficult, but I didn’t find any of them unfair.

I do feel like some areas of the game feel a bit directionless. Like at one point you have to take down a helicopter, but despite shooting at it with all of the ammo from every gun I had, it wouldn’t go down.

I spent about an hour trying to just get past the area thinking maybe I just had to avoid it, and while exploring and trying other solutions is fun, it eventually became an annoyance and I had to check a play through to see exactly what the game wants you to do at this part (shoot the helicopter down, I just didn’t have enough ammo and had to go back to an earlier save).

This might’ve just been an issue on the hardest difficulty, and I probably should’ve tried that sooner, but I didn’t really want to lose too much progress.

Minor issue, not a big deal.

The game has a health and armour system. Neither of these regenerate naturally, you need to find health or armour power ups around the map or regenerate them at recharge stations.

Armour reduces the % of damage you take to your health significantly, without it enemies can take you down very quickly.

It’s a good system and it forces you to play as smartly as possible to maintain both your health and armour.

As well as that, since regeneration isn’t guaranteed, you might finish a combat section, realise your health and armour took more damage than you’d like, and you’ll load a previous save again to do more optimally.

I played on the hard difficulty for my first play through and this was a bit more difficult than I’d have liked, enemies hit very hard and take a lot of shots to take down, your health pickup is also reduced.

If I was to play through this game again, I’d probably just stick with medium difficulty, it’d make the game just a bit more enjoyable.

The graphics still hold up very well if you ask me, while this game isn’t on the Source engine, it’s the beginning of Valve’s early Source engine aesthetic, which I still find very pleasing to the eye.

One thing is though, Half Life has received multiple re-releases and updates over the years. The Blue Shift expansion was developed by Gearbox and they reworked character and weapon models, these were added to the PC version and they’re described as “HD models” in the options.

Unfortunately, some of them aren’t exactly faithful to the original models. Some weapon models are literally different weapons, although they function the same, they did change some of the weapon sounds to reflect these changed weapon models.

Some of the new character models arguably change the design too much compared to Valve’s originals.

I wasn’t aware of this when I started playing, so I did end up playing through the entire game with these HD models enabled, as they were on by default, however this has since been changed with the 25th anniversary update.

While it didn’t bother me too much, I still would’ve liked to have played with the original models instead, as it was the original designs by Valve artists and I do believe they fit the aesthetic of the world better, but it’s no big deal and the option is now disabled by default, although maybe renaming them to something other than HD models would make it more clear as to what they are.

The levels are designed well and they switch it up often enough with indoor areas and outdoor areas to keep things interesting.

Plenty of creative puzzles involving different environmental aspects such as water, boxes, laser tripwires, etc…

I do think some levels are a bit too long and at some points I was wishing I’d get to the next area to change things up.

The audio in the game is a weird one. While I like the actual sounds for basically everything in this game, I find the way the audio engine presents them to be a disorientating.

The game will try to echo certain sounds in some areas. Like walking through a vent will cause the footsteps to create an echo, or firing a gun in some areas will echo.

But for me, I found this echo, especially initially, to be quite sore on my ears, it was actually giving me a headache as I played and I thought something was wrong with the game audio.

This went away the more I played and despite this issue that I had, I do appreciate the effort put into the audio in the game and their attempts to make it as immersive as possible, but it’s just something I thought I’d mention.

Speaking of audio, the soundtrack is fantastic. Although I do wish it was implemented into the game a bit better, as it does literally feel like an MP3 file which will just play when you get to a trigger, and the game will continue to play it even if you load a save.

I never realised before playing this game that the iconic Valve intro cinematic music was originally from this game. I’m not going to lie, the first time it plays in the game it’s absolutely amazing and it really gets you going for a great section of the game too. Love it!

Half Life is a fantastic game with great gameplay, level design, story telling and a banger soundtrack!

The pacing can be a bit off and some levels really do drag on a little too long, but it’s not too much of an issue.

Overall, this game’s impact can’t be understated, it’s well deserving of it’s reputation and it still holds up to this day. I’d definitely recommend!

I’ll say right now, I’m not going to recommend this game, regardless of whether it’s good or not, simply because it’s always online.

The PAYDAY developers have plenty of examples as to why people don’t like this and why it doesn’t work. Making a game always online in 2023 is ridiculous and it’s especially bad because it’s not a game that has any need to be always online either.

Anyway, I’ve played 14 hours so far and I’ve finished all of the heists. Let’s go over the good and bad of PAYDAY 3.

I will say the game does look good. Particle effects in particular look great, and the texture and model quality is definitely improved over PAYDAY 2.

Performance wise? I’m still using a GTX 1070, which is indeed bottlenecking my entire system. But in order to get over 80-100FPS, I needed to lower all of the games settings and also put on FSR.

Even on low settings, the game looks quite good. So I can live with it until I upgrade.

I’m a bit torn on stealth right now. I haven’t had a chance to properly play stealth with friends, which is how I spent most of my time playing PAYDAY 2, so my opinion might change once I do.

However, I don’t think I enjoy stealth as much as I did in PAYDAY 2. It’s mostly the same as PAYDAY 2, but with some changes.

It seems like they’ve taken some inspiration from the latest HITMAN trilogy for certain things. For example, casing mode has been changed and there’s now different areas of security throughout the map.

• Public Areas - You can explore these areas freely, however committing illegal actions in this area in front of guard/camera will get you caught. These areas are usually full of civilians.
  
• Private Areas - You can explore, but if a guard/camera catches you in this area, you’ll be escorted back to a public area.
  
• Secure Areas - If you’re caught in these areas by a guard/security camera, you’ll get handcuffed and guards will enter search mode.

Speaking of search mode, this is a new state guards can enter for various reasons before the heist goes loud. This will cause guards to alter their routes and search areas around the map. I like it overall, but I do think this state should end after a while, unfortunately it seems to be a permanent state the guards remain in once they begin.

Guards can now hear if you sprint or throw bags too close to them. I’m really not a fan of this. It’s very inconsistent because it entirely depends on the type of area you’re in or whether you’re in casing mode or not.

For example, you can go to a private area in casing mode, and sprint right next to a guard. He won’t react. But if you mask up, and sprint next to the guard in the same area, he’ll come to investigate.

As well as that, one of my favourite things about PAYDAY 2 stealth, was getting skilled with the games movement and using it to manoeuvre around guards and civilians. But in PAYDAY 3, you really can’t sprint or jump anywhere near guards because they’ll hear you.

Sprinting or jumping past guards isn’t possible either anymore, if they’re looking your direction at all, you’ll be instantly spotted doing so.

Lastly, higher difficulties add security modifiers. Unfortunately, Starbreeze have added one that adds a “Lead Guard” to most levels on Overkill difficulty. This lead guard has an infinite pager, so if you take him out, his pager will repeatedly go off until the heist inevitably goes loud. His routes can change depending on the objective you’re on too.

For example, I did the first heist in solo stealth. I learnt all the routes and cleared a nice path to the van. But as soon as I started moving bags, the lead guards route changed to move around the van area, meaning I spent like 20 minutes moving bags and waiting for him to finish his route. I don’t mind moving bags, but this just felt obnoxious.

Overall stealth feels like it’s been unnecessarily slowed down. Not a fan.

So, in terms of loud gunplay, it’s what we all loved about PAYDAY 2 and better. Shooting hordes of enemies is still super satisfying.

The AI is much improved over PAYDAY 2, with enemies tactically hiding behind shields, shielded enemies turning to block grenade explosions near them, cloakers have much more advanced movement including use a grapple and wall running, Dozers are absolutely terrifying with high amounts of health, and they pump out ridiculous amounts of damage. Overall, there’s some nice improvements.

You can now take civilian hostages, which is a nice feature, especially to move them quicker. Hostages can be traded for first aid kits mid-heist, or they can be traded early on to delay the police assault, allowing you to complete early objectives quicker and without resistance.

In PAYDAY 3, armour no longer fully regenerates, instead if you take heavy damage, you’ll only regenerate a small amount of the damage you took. You have chunks of armour and once they deplete fully, you don’t get them back without an armour bag.

When your armour is gone, your health is what takes the damage instead, and this can be drained extremely quickly.

Overall, I’m not a fan of the armour changes. These changes basically make armour bags invaluable, and it makes all the other deployables fairly worthless. If you lose your armour during a heist and you’re out of armour bags, well then that’s it, you might as well quit.

Skills have been significantly nerfed in PAYDAY 3.

Instead of being able to build a huge variety of unique builds with different playstyles like in PAYDAY 2, PAYDAY 3 simplifies it and removes a lot of the unique abilities gained from skills. Most of the skills with unique abilities in PAYDAY 3, are stuff that were abilities by default in PAYDAY 2, like camera looping (albeit it’s stronger in PAYDAY 3).

There’s 3 timed buffs that skills can provide, depending on which action you’re doing.

• Edge - Deal 10% extra damage
  
• Grit - Take 10% less damange
  
• Rush - Increased movement speed

So for example, one skills gives you “Edge” for switching to your secondary weapon, but “Edge” is removed if you ADS, so you have to hipfire.

The buffs just don’t have much of a significant impact on the gameplay at all. As well as that, a lot of them are very difficult to keep track of.

Trying to build some unique weapon specific or gameplay styled build in PAYDAY 3 just doesn’t exist.

Progression isn’t great. You don’t get XP for heists anymore, only cash.

Instead, XP is earned by completing challenges, which are all listed and thrown into an awful menu which is impossible to navigate. You don’t get notified of when a challenge is completed mid-game either.

I like some of the changes to how weapon attachments are unlocked, they’re instead locked behind a weapon level similar to CoD games are.

However, you don’t just get weapon XP for using a weapon, you have to complete challenges with the weapon, which again, are thrown into an awful menu and you have no idea if you complete a challenge or not mid heist.

Matchmaking is awful.

There’s no chat in the lobby, you can’t tell if people want to go loud or stealth until the heist starts, if you restart the heist you don’t get put back into the lobby to change things, preplanning is absolutely atrocious and downgraded significantly from PAYDAY 2 (which was already lacking), when the heist ends the lobby is disbanded, you can’t add people directly from the game or lobby.

The UI is horribly inspired by CoD. Zero numbers for weapons stats, not enough information on the HUD and awful menus overall.

Starbreeze should’ve known a lot of these choices were unacceptable. Don’t recommend buying until they give this game some major quality of life updates, if they even do.

Titanfall 2. The first true full game by Respawn Entertainment, a studio created by ex-Infinity Ward employees, the original developers of the Call of Duty franchise and creators of the first two original Modern Warfare games.

Just when the industry was growing tired of every first-person shooter trying to replicate the same formula as Call of Duty, Respawn came out with the original Titanfall.

A multiplayer only experience with an emphasis on movement and speed. This was the game which started the jetpack and wall running trend that Call of Duty also jumped in on.

With Titanfall 2, they aimed to make a fully-fledged game with both a single player and multiplayer component.

This review will contain some minor spoilers for the very beginning of the games campaign.

I’ve always been a fan of the Infinity Ward Call of Duty campaigns and I was looking forward to finally seeing what Respawn managed to cook up in terms of single player after Titanfall 1. Needless to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

The game is set during a war between the Frontier Militia and the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, also known as the IMC. I definitely enjoyed the worldbuilding in Titanfall 2, but I wish there was more overall in the campaign, especially in regards to the IMC.

In Titanfall 2 you play as Jack Cooper, initially a militia grunt who eventually becomes a Pilot. Pilots are skilled combat soldiers who are linked to a Titan, AI machines built for war.

I’m not a massive fan of Jack himself, he seems like a typical voiced first-person shooter protagonist. He’s not annoying or anything, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly redeeming about him.

His Titan on the other hand, BT, is easily one of the best things about Titanfall 2. Sure we’ve all seen likable robot companions in other media, but there’s something about BT that’s extra likeable. His dry sense of humour and no-nonsense attitude is great, and the few times you’re not with BT throughout the game, I couldn’t wait to reunite with him just to hear what he has to say about our current situation.

The game will often give you various dialogue options to interact with BT. Sometimes these will be single choice lines where you can only pick one before it ends the conversation, or they’ll just be a small list of dialogue options that the game expects you to go through one by one in any order you please, typically as you traverse across a level. It doesn’t add much depth or re-playability, if any, but it does exist.

I honestly think a major part of why BT is so likeable also has to do with his animations. The Titans in this game are animated EXTREMELY well, especially BT. How they move, shoot, fall from the sky, etc… they’re done so well.

The animation, sound and level design in this game just makes things feel… epic, like really epic. At one point, BT needs to throw you across a great distance as you can’t reach the next area of the level yourself. The animation of his arms, his voice lines as he tells you his current calculations regarding wind direction and speed, the sound design as he finally throws you… it sounds ridiculous, but being thrown to the next area in a level is one of the most epic and hype inducing things in this game, a game which is full of epic moments.

Respawn’s level designers aren’t afraid to go big either. This game has some amazing level scale, in a lot of levels you’ll feel tiny as a pilot as you go across these massive areas, and sometimes you’ll still feel small even while in your Titan.

One level I particularly love has you go through a massive factory with tons of moving platforms, the scale feels huge, and the level design really doesn’t restrict your movement at all. Think of the opening of Portal 2, but on an even larger scale and with great fast-paced movement.

Respawn specifically designed each level to have some sort of unique gameplay element, and one level allows you to time travel between the past and the present instantaneously. I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s executed absolutely perfectly and it’s such a great level, easily one of the best levels I’ve played in a first-person shooter in the last 10 years.

Gameplay wise, movement is the highlight of this game. Sprinting, sliding, wall running and jumping all feel fantastic. You can combine all of this movement tech to build up some insane speed and the levels are designed very well around the games movement too.

All of the levels make great use of the games movement. There’s very few invisible walls (if any), and you can usually find some clever routes throughout the level using risky movement, even if the route isn’t intended.

Enemy variation is pretty good, from grunt humans, to fast moving acrobatic robots, to enemy pilots in Titans and more. There’s always a bit of a challenge in each level and the enemy variation will force you to alter your playstyle. The bosses you face throughout the game have good personalities for the short time they’re around as well.

Combat overall isn’t anything special, but it usually isn’t in most first-person shooters if you ask me. The sound design means shooting enemies is satisfying and the movement combined with the shooting can create some cool moments.

Titan gameplay is okay, but I don’t think their design was focused on single player. It’s not bad mind you, but it’s fairly easy, even on the hardest difficulty. Animations are good and you can jump, dash and sprint while in the Titan, the animations for entering your Titan are very good and the transition is always smooth.

As you progress through the campaign, you’ll find new loadouts for your Titan, they can technically be skipped, but there’s no reason to and they’re usually in a very obvious location on a linear path, so they’re hard to miss and not exactly hidden.

The loadouts mostly seem like a feature for multiplayer that they decided to include in single player, probably to help players learn the different Titan loadouts before jumping into multiplayer.

While they’re cool, in a casual playthrough on the hardest difficulty, I found myself just sticking to the default loadout, as I didn’t feel confident enough to switch mid-battle and risk dying. That’s not to say they have no use, as I’ve seen speedrunners do amazing strategies combining the different loadouts, but for a first time playthrough on the hardest difficulty anyway, I found myself struggling to find the time and place to experiment and learn the different loadouts.

Graphics wise, the rendering might not look like anything special, but some of the work the artists did in this game is fantastic. Epic and gorgeous skyboxes making the scale of the world feel massive, FANTASTIC animation work (especially on the Titans), and some great lighting in a lot of scenes.

Overall, the campaign is a great experience. Some of the best levels in a first-person shooter in years, a great robot companion and some fun gameplay. Easily recommended.

I’ll be short regarding multiplayer. I only played Titanfall 2’s multiplayer back when it was exclusively on EA Origin. Now I didn’t play much, but I got a couple of hours in.

While I think it can be a fun experience, I’m personally not a fan of this games type of movement in a multiplayer game. It has so few restrictions, a player who invests a lot of hours into this game can become an absolute nuisance with the movement mechanics if they’re good enough.

While I like a skill gap, I don’t like one this big. I find the movement too fast and the multiplayer a bit too erratic.

The movement alone is enough for me not to enjoy this games multiplayer. It’s likely well balanced and can be fun, but like I said, it’s a bit too erratic for me.

Great campaign. Not a fan of the multiplayer. Fun achievements.

Battlefield V… a game rife with controversy pre-launch and post-launch, abandoned just as it started to truly improve.

Just to note, I have 282 hours on this game on the EA app.

While Battlefield 1 had some issues, it still felt like a passion project and is possibly the greatest World War I game ever made, brought to life within the Frostbite Engine.

Battlefield V on the other hand, the game following Battlefield 1 (yes, this series has awful naming), is set during World War II and instead of feeling like a passion project with a team that’s dedicated on giving us a somewhat immersive war experience with the Frostbite engine, DICE instead opted to try their own spin on WWII… a bad one.

Let’s start with…

Battlefield 1 was generally well received, but the community had it’s complaints, especially after coming from Battlefield 4. Going back in time and limiting the sandbox wasn’t what a lot of people wanted, but still, the game was massively praised for it’s graphics, sound effects and it’s ability to immerse players in WWI on modern systems. A lot of players also did really enjoy it once they got used to the gameplay and updates increased the content in the game.

Before the release of BFV, there was tons of speculation about what era the next game would be set in. Eventually it was announced the title of the game would be Battlefield V and would be set during WWII.

Players were excited, WWII involves possibly the most famous battles in the history of the human race. This was DICE’s opportunity to show these battles in a first-person shooter on one of the most graphically impressive game engines out there.

When the trailer dropped… all hopes were shattered. Characters were running around with prosthetic limbs firing machine guns during WWII, characters said cheesy lines despite the fact that they were currently in the middle of combat, they wore ridiculous outfits that real soldiers never wore and overall the historical accuracy was basically non-existent.

It felt like a parody of World War II. They took WWII as a setting and then just tossed the worst of modern game art into it, hoping to score some easy monetization.

There was also backlash due to game allowing you to pick your characters gender and race, despite it not being historically accurate for certain genders or race to fight on certain sides. Personally, it’s not something I care much about, especially in multiplayer, but I can see arguments from both sides being somewhat valid.

DICE decided to mock fans at the launch party for the game. At the party, a big screen, with messages handpicked by DICE, containing a mix of nonsense “feedback” and actual valid reactions from members of the community.

Nonsense such as “Genderfield 5” and actual valid community reactions such as “What the f*** was the developers thinking!”

Instead of listening to actual feedback and communicating properly with people, they decided to ignore everyone and openly mock the community, regardless of whether the feedback was good or not.

Great start… let’s move onto the actual game.

The campaign is in the same format as BF1, “War Stories” which have the player playing through different soldiers stories throughout the war.

Like BF1, the game starts off with a fairly strong prologue war story. This war story brings us through each year of the war from a different soldiers perspective.

While BF1’s prologue intends to show you the absolute horrors of WWI and the loss of life which occurred, BFV’s is more about the epic scale of WWII, as you go from several different fronts on land and in the sky.

It's definitely not bad, the music is great and it really gets you excited to see how DICE have brought WWII to such a graphically impressive engine.

After that, it all goes wrong… while the war stories in BF1’s war stories weren’t amazing, some of them had their moments and the levels themselves were well put together. The worst thing about BF1’s campaign was how it didn’t feel as big as it should’ve.

BFV takes this to another level while also being worse at absolutely everything else. You thought you’d see D-Day on the Frostbite engine? Think again.

I wouldn’t recommend the campaign at all. It takes the worst from BF1 and amplifies it massively.

The multiplayer for BFV was often panned for its historical inaccuracies, however I don’t really care about that, I care about the gameplay.

They made some significant changes in the multiplayer for BFV, some good, some bad.

The movement is possibly my favourite change to BFV. It’s fast and very fluid. Sliding works very well and you have a lot of control over your character while doing it, it allows good players to out-manoeuvre those who haven’t mastered the movement as well. This game also introduced sprinting while crouched, a very nice addition which allows you to keep a lower profile while keeping some speed.

Characters now naturally goes onto their back when prone in certain positions, rather than always lying on their stomach. You also have control over how your character lands when falling from smaller heights, you can roll which takes longer but negates all damage, or you can just fall and take the damage, but you’ll be a bit quicker to get your sights up. It’s a very nice system.

They removed spotting, which has been in the series since at least the original Bad Company. Instead of spotting, you can now ping locations similar to say Valorant.

You can still get traditionally spotted if enemies are using certain combat roles, but later on they added a “You are spotted” indicator to let you know that you’re currently marked for the entire enemy team, a great addition.

Speaking of combat roles, they added these on top of the traditional class system. Each class has different combat roles, which basically just changes the perks you have. It's stupidly convoluted and overcomplicates things unnecessarily. They had planned to add additional combat roles post-launch, but didn’t bother because of the games poor reception.

The UI in general is dreadful. For example, there’s some fun challenges to unlock skins for weapons, however you need to ACTIVATE each challenge for each weapon individually in the main menu. You can only have 4 active at a time, if you complete them, you then have to LEAVE whatever server you’re in, activate more and then look for another server. This is an absolute nightmare if you’re playing with friends. Games like CoD4 came out in 2007 and you could complete any challenge at any time without ever leaving the game.

Maps in multiplayer aren’t great either, a lot of the maps are too big even for 64 player conquest. You basically have to play as a medic in this game in order to do any effective push as there’s often not enough cover and medics are the only class with effective smokes. If you don’t have several medics who creates smokes for your team, you aren’t going to advance at all. It feels very unbalanced, especially in the linear game modes.

The new fortification system is a great addition to BF, which allows players to build fortifications all over maps.

It’s not overly complicated too like say Fortnite. You simply take out your fortification tool and outlines of what and where you can build will appear around you, simply go up to them, hold left click and bam, you just built something.

This was a great addition that I was originally reluctant about, but it did grow on me.

The campaign really isn’t worth playing, the multiplayer had some good changes but it’s definitely more frustrating than BF1 and just when DICE started to make some excellent progress, they abandoned the game to create the terrible Battlefield 2042.

A terrible pre-release, a terrible release and a terrible post-release filled with tons of broken promises and poor communication.

As of 2023, buy Battlefield 1 instead.

I have no idea how I came into possession of this game, although I've apparently owned it for several years. Scrolling through my Steam library looking for something to play, I decided to give The Deed a shot after reading some reviews.

Not the type of game I typically enjoy, but it definitely surprised me.

Your father has removed you from his will and is instead giving it all to your mentally ill sister. So there's only one thing you can do... kill your sister and get away with it.

To do this, you can pick up two different types of objects in the house.

• A murder weapon which you'll use to commit the crime
  
• A piece of evidence to later frame someone else for the murder.

You can only pick up two objects total however, and it can be two of the same type of object if you like, as you can murder your sister with your hands if you decide against an object as a murder weapon.

Honestly it might not sound very gripping, but it is fun experimenting with the different possibilities.

Each character in the house has small bits of dialogue with your character too, and your responses to them can influence the verdict on who possibly killed your sister.

The Deed is played at an isometric viewpoint and it can't be played at widescreen resolutions. I'm not actually sure what the resolution is, but I had black bars on the sides and my NVIDIA overlay appeared very blurry when it popped up on launch, so I'm guessing it's quite low.

That being said, the low resolution with this type of game design fits this game perfectly. It's a very eerie type of setting, and the design of the home itself definitely adds to that.

The Deed has achievements which I managed to get all of in just two hours, and it also has trading cards.

The only minor problems I had with this game were...

• Sometimes I couldn't click anything after loading a save and would have to restart the game.
  
• Trying to screenshot with F12 would cause the game to crash.
  
• The Steam overlay doesn't work with this game, which is slightly annoying when trying to check achievements, but it's not a big deal.

Overall a great little game to kill an hour or two in with a very nice classic aesthetic.

A fun and charming 30 minute tutorial for the Steam Deck set in the Portal universe.

It’s exciting having a new first person Source 2 game outside of VR as well. It makes me hopeful for more standard Valve games in the coming years.

Fallout: New Vegas was my introduction to the Fallout series, and RPGs in general. I originally played this game on the PS3 in 2010 when it released, and despite being the most problematic version of the game, I still adored it.

After receiving my Steam Deck last year, I decided to play through the game again fully for the first time in years. I also never got a chance to play the last DLC, so I figured it was a good opportunity to give it a try.

New Vegas was made in just 18 months. Developed by Obsidian Entertainment, which was founded by five developers who originally worked at Black Isle Studios, the developers of the original Fallout games, before Bethesda bought the property and revamped the series with Fallout 3.

New Vegas runs on the same engine as Fallout 3, however it has got some improvements. I’d compare the two games to GTA III and Vice City in terms of engine changes between the two, with New Vegas being Vice City.

I played through the game vanilla, on the hardest difficulty, with Hardcore Mode enabled (adds survival elements like hunger, hydration and tiredness) and with no fast travel.

The base game of New Vegas is set in the Mojave Wasteland (post apocalyptic Mojave Desert) on the west coast of America, a stark contrast to the Capital Wasteland on the east coast in Fallout 3.

Others have often claimed the Mojave Wasteland feels empty, especially compared to Fallout 3, but I disagree, I think the Mojave Wasteland is filled almost perfectly with content for you to experience as you explore the wastes.

Yes, some areas feel a little barebones and don’t live up to their full potential, but there’s only a handful of locations where I thought this.

New Vegas (post apocalyptic Las Vegas) itself is severely restricted by the limitations induced by consoles at the time, as well as the engine not being optimised for such dense scenes. The biggest problem being the city is cut up into several sections with load screens in between, it’s not ideal but they did what they could for the time.

The writing of New Vegas is it’s strongest point. The game has a ton of different dialogue options, allowing players to role-play different types of characters well without breaking immersion too much.

They even went to the effort of adding unique choices and dialogue if your character has low intelligence. It’s obviously not for every conversation as it’d take too much time with the short development time New Vegas had, but it’s one of those things they clearly had ideas for and just didn’t have the time to flesh it out fully.

Multiple main faction choices for the player to side with also allow you to take the story in several general directions, while your interactions with smaller factions can alter their course as well as their future with the main factions in control by the end of the game. It’s very well thought out.

The combat is possibly the weakest part of the gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, levelling up further and destroying enemies that were previously a major annoyance is very satisfying. But the weapons in the game can often feel clunky and unsatisfying.

New Vegas added a traditional aiming down sight mechanic, something that was missing in Fallout 3. However it can bug out quite often and it feels like a good few weapons don't actually shoot where you aim.

Shotguns can be very satisfying to use, especially since you can blow the limbs off of your enemies and you don’t really need to aim too much to use them. Melee, while not having much weight and usually just consists of you swinging until the enemies health bar gets to 0, is also very satisfying for the same reason the shotguns are.. little aiming required and plenty of gore.

Enemy variation is very good. But human NPCs are very bland in terms of tactics, especially those with ranged weapons, they never take cover and seem to just strafe back and forth while firing.

Levelling up your character is addictive and the way you build your character will have an impact on the actions you can perform. Want to blow up a cave for a quest? You need to be skilled with explosives. Want to persuade someone to avoid confrontation with you? You need a high speech skill to say just the right thing to them.

Depending on the skills you increase, you can get perks for those skills too. It’s quite layered and will keep you looking forward to your next level up.

New Vegas also adds crafting, something that didn’t really exist in Fallout 3. They did an excellent job with the first iteration of this and I think Bethesda did a great job expanding on it in Fallout 4.

There’s different types of crafting depending on the object you interact with. Campfires, reloading benches, and workbenches.

Campfires allow you to cook foods and allows you to make medicines and herbs.

Reloading benches allow you to craft different variations of your ammunition and also allows you to breakdown your ammunition into raw materials. I absolutely love this addition and it’s something that isn’t even in Fallout 4, it really adds a lot of depth to standard ballistic weapons.

Workbenches allow you to build weapons, repair kits, recycle and overcharge energy weapon ammunition and so on.

Crafting was a great addition to New Vegas and it adds a ton of depth to the game, it also gives junk items some sort of use.

Dead Money was the first DLC for New Vegas. Stripping the players of all their equipment and throwing them into an extremely hostile environment wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but others really loved it.

Initially I was one of those people who didn’t really enjoy Dead Money, but my replay this time made me appreciate it much more.

It’s set in the Sierra Madre villa and casino, an extremely atmospheric location which turns the game into a bit of a horror survival game with ghost people as enemies and invincible holograms that patrol and hunt you down if spotted.

Great cast of characters and the history behind the location is excellent. Definitely a fantastic DLC and I would recommend playing it.

Honest Hearts is the second DLC, set in Zion Canyon, which is pretty. I didn't enjoy this DLC nearly as much this time around and it's not how I remember it.

Nothing but fetch quests and there’s one decent new character that hasn't got enough dialogue and a few uninteresting characters.

There's simply not enough choice in this DLC either and out of the two options you do have, only one of them is kinda logical.

I will say one of the best parts of this DLC is a story told by a survivor of the great war through messages they leave on terminals throughout Zion. It's captivating and tragic, very well written.

Old World Blues is the third DLC and is set in the Big MT Research Facility.

This DLC has some great characters, plenty of new content and some very interesting ideas.

Only complaint with this DLC is how ridiculously strong enemies are, especially at higher levels.

The final DLC for New Vegas was Lonesome Road, set in The Divide.

First time playing this DLC and I loved it. It's a nice change of pace, bringing the player on a linear path, but it works great.

Fantastic antagonist, good location which adds some missing verticality to the gameplay of New Vegas, captivating dialogue and some interesting critical choices that can affect the world outside of the DLC.

Only complaint is how it adds background to your character, potentially limiting your character story if role-playing.

New Vegas is a fantastic game and I’d recommend everyone try it at least once, it's almost guaranteed to rope you in.

Only complaints is the lack of immersive fast travel options in the game world, and the stability. I had a few crashes in the base game anytime I tried to play the game at 4K, mods can fix it, but just something to note.

Overall, great game.

So Modern Warfare II is the second game in the rebooted Modern Warfare universe, the first Call of Duty game I’ve bought at full price in years and the first I’ve put significant time into since Black Ops 2 on console.

I decided to buy this game for three reasons.

1. I wanted a somewhat casual arcade shooter to play with some elements to grind through.
2. It’s actually on Steam and not the awful Battle.net launcher.
3. Rumours of this Call of Duty game having 2 years of support instead of 1 led me to believe it’d be worth the money. Although it seems like Activision might have backtracked on those plans and this game will only be receiving 1 year of support instead.

So despite the fact that I have nearly 140 hours while writing this review, I just can’t recommend this game.

I had some great fun with this game on release. I really don't think you can beat the release experience of a Call of Duty game, it's always a great time while everyone is learning the game.

But as time has gone on, it's quite clear Infinity Ward have no interest in fixing the major issues of this game, and there's a LOT of issues.

The user interface in this game is the worst user interface I’ve seen in any game, EVER.

In the menus, everything is just massive tiles that scroll left to right instead of up and down. Everything is in submenus, you go through at least 2-3 extra menus for almost everything in this game just because they've organised everything so poorly.

Want to pick a class from a nice vertical list at the start of a game that shows all of your classes without having to scroll? Nope! MWII has messed up the UI so bad, you now get to see like 4 classes at a time as these big tiles, then you have to scroll to the right to view more.

The UI is truly abysmal in the menus. If any of you remember Windows 8, with the “Metro” design language, it's like that except even worse. It's designed for tablets, but I don't think it’d even be great on those either.

The UI in-game isn't much better. Nearly EVERYTHING in the HUD is monochrome. In the original Modern Warfare 2, icons in the HUD had some colour, but almost everything from grenade icons to killstreaks is just bland plain white icons, it has zero personality.

Absolutely dreadful UI and they've done nothing to really improve it since release.

The gunsmith in MWII is where you can customise your weapons with attachments and skins.

This part of the game has the same UI issues I just mentioned, however there's even more issues with the gunsmith.

This game just has a ridiculous amount of attachments. For example, remember how you had the choice of putting a single type of grip on your weapons in old CoD games? Well in this game you have the choice of like 20 different types of grips.

Now that might sound great, you get more customisation for your weapons, and I agree.

However, the UI is so bad in this game that they don't even give you specific stats on what each attachment changes. The information they tell you regarding each attachment is so vague, there's no bars or numbers, just stupid pros and cons like “+ Improve stability” and “- Increased ADS time”, stuff like that.

Several attachments will have the same pros and cons listed, and the game won’t give you any information on which does what better. If you want to know, you'll have to search for it and find out from the community.

The game also launched without the ability to save attachments despite the last game having it… extremely lazy.

For this game they significantly changed how the perk system works, for the worst.

So instead of just picking 3 perks for your classes and starting the game with those perks, you now pick 4 perks for each of your classes, except 2 of them only become available as the match progresses.

This absolutely dreadful system means you're missing some of the best perks in the game until later, such as Ghost which prevents you from appearing on the radar by UAVs.

Ghost has always been a problem in CoD, but I’m pretty sure we ironed out most of its issues in Black Ops 2 ten years ago by making it only work when people are moving.

So with this change, you'd expect them to have maybe changed how UAVs work as well right? Nope. Players still get a UAV at a 3 killstreak, which means there's constantly UAVs in the sky and you’re CONSTANTLY on the radar until Ghost kicks in later in the game.

It's terribly balanced and it's such an unnecessary change.

They also brought back Last Stand, except you can't shoot your gun in Last Stand now, but you can revive yourself!

This stupid perk was removed from the series for a reason, and whoever is working at Infinity Ward now, probably wasn’t around back in the day, so they've decided to add it back because they probably thought it was “cool”.

Perks that change the time to kill of enemies DON'T BELONG IN THE GAME. I’ve had a few deaths now where I'll shoot a guy and think I've killed him, only for him to drop into last stand (where he's invincible as he falls to the floor), I'll aim down towards him to finish him off and someone else will kill me because I'm distracted doing so. It doesn’t belong in the game.

Lastly about the perk system, is the awful UI regarding it. So in the menus, you only get to make 5 perk packages, these are basically perk pre-sets for your classes. You can make 10 custom classes, but only 5 perk packages… why?

Another awful UI element regarding perks while in-game, is the fact that you've no way to check what perks you currently have active without dying. It can be easy to miss if your third or fourth perk has activated yet, and if you missed the notification telling you it has, you have no way of knowing whether you're safe from UAVs with your Ghost perk or not without dying. When you die, your perk progress for that match appears on the bottom of the screen, only to fade away after a few seconds… zero thought went into this.

The matchmaking is awful. It’s clearly some form of engagement based matchmaking, designed to keep as many players as possible playing the game. This often means if you're a good player, you'll get punished with bad teammates against a better team. The idea being to keep as many of the average casual players, of which there's a lot more of, playing the game for longer by sacrificing the experience of the fewer good players.

Have one good game? Expect to be carrying a team of terrible players for the next 3 games, games you're guaranteed to lose, because the algorithm decides this will keep more players more likely to continue playing the game.

This basically makes most 6v6 modes unplayable. The only mode I found where you can kinda thrive regardless of your team, is Search and Destroy. But limiting yourself to just one mode simply to have a decent matchmaking experience shouldn't be a thing.

Single Player isn’t great. Terrible dialogue and messy story.

Spec Ops isn't even close to being as good as it was in the original MW2/MW3. Only 3 levels, also pretty boring. The mode feels tossed in just for the sake of padding the game with more content.

Ground War is a terrible version of Battlefield with awful maps and zero balance.

DMZ is fun for a bit, but good luck playing it without 4 people.

And Warzone is Warzone, it shouldn't be part of this game and they should just make it its own thing.

There's a lot more I can say about this game, most of it negative, but unfortunately Steam has a limit.

I just don't think Infinity Ward have any idea how to make a decent CoD game anymore. From balance issues to terrible game design, it's quite clear they don't really know what they're doing.

I'll still play this game from time to time, just to scratch that itch. But if you haven't bought this game yet, don’t. It’s not worth the money.

I originally bought Battlefield 1 on Origin (now the EA app) back when it released. I have 253 hours on that as of writing this review, and 12.5 hours on Steam.

This was the first "next-gen" exclusive Battlefield game after Battlefield 4, and DICE went all out updating and making the most out of the frostbite engine.

The campaign is in a "War Story" format, with the player playing through different soldiers stories of World War 1. I played on hard.

It starts off very strong, with a prequel war story to get the player started, throwing them into frontline combat, you're told you will not survive.

Soldiers from both sides are shooting and storming at each other. Brutal close quarters combat occurs on both sides, using anything they can as weapons. Artillery rains down on different parts of the battlefield.

You can fight for as long as you like, but eventually you will be overran and you will die.

At this point, the camera will leave the solider and zoom out and above, the name of the solider you controlled will appear on screen as well as their date of birth and date of death, and then it will pan to another soldier in a different scenario on the battlefield, which you will take control of until they die.

During the last scenario, artillery obliterates the battlefield and a cutscene plays. The soldier we were playing as survived, he's dazed from the explosion. He gets up to see nothing but complete destruction and dead bodies from both sides all around. He turns around, an enemy soldier is in the same situation as him. They aim their rifles at each other, jaded and tired, looking each other in the eye. The sun is shining on both of them through all of the toxic smoke and debris. They both lower their rifles.

It's an amazing introduction to the player. It shows the player the absolute death and destruction of war and World War 1 in particular.

That's about where the good parts of the story end unfortunately. The concept of a campaign which consists of individual stories from World War 1 sounds fantastic, but I don't think they made use of its potential.

I'm not going to review each individual war story, as I don't think there's that much to talk about. But, the writing just isn't that great for them. Some of the characters are quite annoying (looking at you Blackburn), and most of the characters all seem a little too happy being in the situations they're in. You don't really get anything equivalent to the prequel throughout the campaign.

I will say there's one fantastic sequence in the campaign where you're getting overrun and you send a messenger pigeon back to headquarters to launch artillery on your position. You actually take control of this pigeon and fly it back with the message, and it's a beautiful scene. You fly over the absolutely destroyed battlefield you just fought your way through while a piece of music from the games fantastic soundtrack plays. It's a great scene.

Very few things feel as epic as they should in the campaign unfortunately. There's never enough friendly soldiers storming a battlefield with you, there's never enough enemy soldiers, it always feels like there's only 4-5 NPCs on each side fighting at a time, who then respawn from around the corner of a building whenever another one of them dies.

There's a good too many stealth segments, which I just don't think are very good. They're very easy to cheese, as the game allows you to throw infinite lures to distract enemies. If an enemies attention icon fills completely, everyone in the nearby area will be alerted too, even if you kill them before they can say or do anything.

Enemies have different classes similar to multiplayer, however they're all quite similar in my experience, the only one that made me play any different were recon enemy types, as they can spot you from long distances.

The campaign isn't terrible, but it is disappointing after the fantastic opening level and what could've been.

The multiplayer of Battlefield 1 is where I would say Battlefield started to change from the formula DICE was using since Bad Company 2. Yes, it's still very similar, but I think this is where things started to feel more restrictive in terms of what players could do in the 32v32 sandbox.

Don't get me wrong, there's still some absolutely epic moments in the multiplayer of Battlefield 1 (I'm sure everyone has seen the blimp gif), but the opportunities for players to experiment with different things in the sandbox feels like a lot less than before.

This is due to a few things I think.

The first is, Battlefield games were typically buggy on release, but this one was mostly bug free. So sending vehicles flying across the map for example, wasn't ever really a thing in Battlefield 1.

Second, the game just hasn't got anywhere close to the same amount of customisation players were used to from Battlefield 3 and 4. Obviously it's World War 1, so DICE is limited with what they could add, but this definitely made the game feel more barebones, as it released with very few weapons and gadgets.

And lastly, the map design and vehicle changes, changed the flow of gameplay. We don't have helicopters in Battlefield 1 obviously, which meant large numbers of players weren't parachuting out of the sky anymore and landing on large buildings. None of the Battlefield 1 maps even have large buildings that you can get on top of anyway, the biggest type of house you can get on top of is a three story house, quite a difference compared to massive construction sites in Battlefield 3 or skyscrapers in Battlefield 4.

I think these are the major reasons Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V felt more restrictive than other entries, and I do think it's a bit of a problem, but even then it's a small issue and there's not much DICE can do when the game is set during World War 1 and they want to keep it somewhat immersive.

A lot of good Battlefield players will say Battlefield 1 caters to a more casual audience, and that's true to an extent, but I also think Battlefield 1 is a game where if you're in anyway a good player, you'll absolutely destroy the majority of players regardless of what weapon you use.

The time to kill is quite low, at least compared to Battlefield V and other shooters like MWII. So better players can escape situations a lot easier if their movement is good, while worse players struggle to finish enemies off as they can't land all their shots.

Unfortunately though, like I said, the game does cater to casual players in other ways.

If the enemy team is losing hard, they're granted a behemoth, which is typically a special vehicle on most maps that can be very hard to kill. Rewarding players for losing.

Planes are also fairly easy to fly and they completely destroy infantry. If a pilot is aware of AA gun locations on a map, they can be near impossible to kill.

Lastly regarding multiplayer, the unlock system.. it isn't great, especially for specialisations (perks). Unlocks are done through assignments in Battlefield 1 and some of the requirements for them just aren't fun.

Forcing players to play certain ways for unlocks makes gameplay worse and causes players to not play the objective. If you haven't played Battlefield 1 yet, I'll tell you now destroying 10 tanks with a crossbow launcher isn't an easy task. It'll take you quite some time to get it if you're not deliberately playing worse to force yourself into situations that allow you to get those kills. This is a major problem with modern Call of Duty games too and ideally developers should avoid this type of design.

Battlefield 1 is a fantastic entry to the Battlefield series with a "meh" campaign and a great multiplayer experience that allows good players to thrive.

It's a masterpiece in visuals, audio and PC optimisation and no other game has come close to running this well while looking and sounding this good.

CS:GO released in 2012, over 10 years ago now. The game was originally meant to be a console port of Counter-Strike: Source, done by Hidden Path Entertainment, before being taken over by Valve and developed for PC as well.

The game quickly became something more, and despite the mixed reaction on release, it has since flourished on PC as the greatest eSports game of all time. The console versions abandoned not long after release.

CS:GO has received some significant updates over the years, but the game still has some glaring issues that the community have wanted changes for, for a long time.

While writing this review, we’re currently on the verge of the game being updated to Source 2, and many hope Valve will bring some significant changes to address many of the games issues.

So for this review, I’m just going to go over some of the games main issues that I hope will get fixed in that update, or future updates. I’ll edit this review if any of my complaints get addressed in the future.

Before I begin, I’ll say right now that CS:GO is a great game. It’s given me a lot of memories and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone who hasn’t played it before. Since it’s free to play now, you’re not really risking anything by trying it, and the base game and community servers offer endless amount of content.

One of the highlights of CS:GO and the reason why I personally think this game took off like no other, was the competitive matchmaking system.

Previous games in the franchise would basically just be community servers and if you wanted to play a 5v5 competitive match from start to finish, you’d have to organise it externally outside of the game.

Of course you could play casually and just join 5v5 servers, but people would just come and go as they please and it never felt official in any capacity.

In CS:GO, the game has a matchmaking system that pairs you up with players of similar skill for a fair and fun game. They have competitive rules, punishments for leaving and a rank system.

The thing that keeps most CS:GO players playing is the ranks. Having something to grind for is a great incentive to play and it can be quite addicting trying to increase your rank.

Now, while matchmaking was great originally, I do think it has slowly gotten worse over time and people have grown increasingly frustrated with it.

The first problem is the disconnect between Valve’s competitive matchmaking and third party matchmaking services which are used in the pro scene.

Matches on Valve’s servers run at a tick rate of 64, while subscription based third party matchmaking services offer servers with a tick rate of 128.

While the average casual player might not notice it, many of the better players can notice a big difference between the two. 128 tick feels a lot better than 64 tick, and it also creates a difference in things like grenade line-ups and throws, as the physics are different.

That might not seem like a big issue, but it can create a big difference to the better players. As well as that, players don’t want to feel like they’re playing an inferior version of the game compared to all the pros they love to watch, which is what matchmaking feels like.

The second problem is that the game gives you zero information when you’ll rank up or rank down.

Valve have been extremely quiet about how ranks work in CS:GO and I think players in recent years have began getting frustrated getting stuck at the same ranks with no obvious signs of which direction their rank is possible going.

A system like Valorant would be very welcome, giving players a clear indication of progress or regression after each match.

Cheating. This is a big problem, and it’s common in not only CS:GO, but basically every PC multiplayer game.

However, CS:GO isn’t like Call of Duty where you can just leave a game if it has a cheater.

The stakes are quite higher in CS:GO, the rank you’ve spent hours and hours grinding for is at risk if you lose and your time is wasted if there’s a cheater in the game.

Unfortunately cheating became such a common problem at one stage, that you were more likely to get a match with a cheater than a match without a cheater.

Once it spreads around the community that cheaters are as common as they are, even if Valve manages to exclude them from the rest of the community behind the scenes, people are still going to be paranoid.

Suddenly players who are just playing better, are being accused of cheating, and it can be very hard to believe they’re not once you’ve seen how common cheating actually is. This completely demoralises teams, because what use is trying to win if you’re convinced someone on the enemy team is cheating?

I’ve seen it first hand. Someone googling a CS:GO cheat, paying an extremely cheap price for it, using it in matchmaking games and despite being reported and clearly hacking, nothing happens to them.

Valve seems to be trying to exclude hackers from the rest of the community and I do think that’s the best solution long term. But something has to be done now as well, as there’s way too many undetected hacks which plague matchmaking.

Unfortunately, the damage regarding people’s perception of cheating in matchmaking has already been done, and people will continue to believe others are cheating even if they’re not.

I think CS:GO is overdue a big publicly announced anti-cheat update. Something that is actually effective in the here and now and also changes people’s perception of cheating. Because right now, it’s very hard for a lot of the community to not automatically think of hacks when playing against players who are as CS:GO puts it “having a really good day”.

Like I said CS:GO is a great game and it looks like Source 2 is around the corner. But an engine update isn’t enough, Valve have to make use of the improved workflow Source 2 provides and push some major changes to keep people interested, especially when competitors are becoming more common such as Valorant.

Players really shouldn’t have to use subscription based third party services to enjoy the game with 128 tick servers and decent anti-cheat. Matchmaking should be as free of cheaters as possible and should play the way a professional game would play in order for players to stay invested.

Yes, the game has other issues. I don't agree with some design decisions, especially a lot of the recent art changes they've made (looking at you cartoony agents), but they're minor compared to the issues highlighted in this review.

Overall though, fantastic game and still the best competitive shooter out there, but some changes are overdue and hopefully they’ll start to come soon.