Recent reviews by Wolly

The STALKER series is cool, don't get me wrong. I would recommend the other games in a fart-beat, even change my review if I could get the game to run decent.

--- Rant about Specs ---

I bought this game like day 5 after release and not even on sale. The game runs like a bad acid trip on my slightly buffed prebuilt from 2016, even with all the graphics on toaster settings. My GPU is peaking constantly in game. I know a PC being a decade old is indeed getting into the "old" territory, but most everything else I ever put on this rig runs fine usually. Below are my specs for anyone to rate or roast in comments:

- AMD Ryzen 5 1660 Six-Core 3.20 GHz
- 24 GB RAM
- Radeon RX 580 GPU
- 64-bit, x64-base processor

I do not like the idea of waiting around after a game is already released for it to (if) eventually be playable. It was indeed sad to hear that the company developed x-ray engine was put down in favor of switching to Unreal 5. Even if the older engine was jank, it was jank that I could run well and get some interesting gun play out of. A lot of care goes into making an in-house game engine, and it feels like that just got thrown out for corporate standard.

--- Actual Gameplay Review ---

Besides my gameplay being half a second in the past from lag, I can still say that the STALKER gameplay loop is still in there, maybe a bit smoother too! You throw bolts at the wobbly air bubbles with your detector out to collect treasure from anomalies, you ambush abandoned mill buildings full of bandits, you chill in towns with other loner newbies and listen to their guitar licks or the incredibly earnest slav rock on the radio.

The open world map does not look as impressive as the geography of Zetta/Jupiter looked in CoP, or the more linear map designs from the older games I only played through in the Anomaly mod. I have yet to explore beyond the lesser zone, but the rest of the map to me looks like just a triangulate weave of POIs.

The new sound design does not feel appropriate to me. Everything has been bass boosted and enhanced with booms or gleams, which can indeed be good for action filled games to communicate to the player when and what goes on during combat, but part of the fun for me was the militaristic realism of the dry sounds as if you were just suddenly in a real firefight. Having less detail to make the player more in the dark on what can happen at any moment lends to the intensity of being unsure, and eventually becomes more rewarding if you do eventually decide to listen in and figure out what sound effects signal soldiers throwing grenades or whatever.

Jack King-Spooner is one of the most inspirational game makers I've found. A lot of the hand crafted look reminds me of Little Big Planet. I miss that game. I'm also not the biggest fan of bilboarded sprites but it does pay off to best show the handiwork.

His earlier works mainly feature what you see of the townsfolk in Judero where they wax philosophically to you and you continue traversing through the worlds as if they were an immersive art exhibit, but this is by far the most engaging conventional gameplay experience he's managed to pull off! The pacing of the gameplay with lighthearted humorous plot beats contrast the older style of heavy-handed dialogue now. Jack always does a good job at giving us glimpses into his cultural background, and the fantasy elements hook you into the wider happenings of this world and what other folktales they came from.

I'm not sure what the status of Pattern Circus is at this point but Sluggish Morss is another good series of games by Jack to play through as long as you aren't sensitive to flashy colors.

I love that after you become powerful enough, you can just fly around with infinite energy like DBZ. I wish more games let you do that.

It alright!

This program is pretty much placing vertecies and using fancy math to make them look good. You can either hand place each vertex or use a bunch of plugins to manipulate them with fancy rendering effects and gaslight yourself into thinking it looks cool.

The brafisks did help me to better play and finally understand this game. I had my first FUN Dorf Fort success and collapse due to werellamas. One invaded my base and I sent my army after it not understanding how they worked. Imagine my surprise when on the next full moon the whole hospital suddenly springs up and starts mauling the whole fort inside out. I couldn't stop laughing. Migrants kept showing up and getting mauled too. Eventually a siege of goblins showed up and I tried sending the last of my dwarves out in a squad before the next full moon but they didn't trigger in time and ran back into the fort. Eventually the goblins stopped standing around obliviously and descended into the fort and that was the last of it.

When I first played this game on Xbone it was a pretty amazing heart-strings-tugger of a narrative shooter. I'm replaying through it now after having read through works of Friedrich Nietzche who was one writer that unfortunately and unknowingly ended up influencing some ideals of the nazi party and now half the background dialogue and rhetoric of this game is hitting differently.

This game is really pretty with some Spanish influence for the art direction, which is the best part to me because I visited Spain once and it's fun to see all the different architecture I could recognize. The combat doesn't smooth out until you're in the mid-late game though, so figuring out how to maneuver around or fight enemies was a hassle since they still do contact damage unlike Dark Souls which threw me off. I really enjoyed playing this game but I had to stop playing it after a while due to it building up anxiety.

So I was playing through Cruelty Squad and getting a feel for the player hitbox and movement when I thought to myself "maybe I should finally try and learn Unity so I could make a game this wacky and fun myself." After some frustration with Unity where scripts would break and have to be reimported upon reopening project files, I discovered that CruS doesn't actually run on Unity, it runs on this obscure engine called Godot! After looking into the engine and thinking it would be some baby building blocks kit, I fell into a rabbit hole and soon found myself pouring hours into tiny white box rooms with different player movement scripts to see if I could replicate b-hopping or air strafing. I like this engine cause the control scheme reminds me of Hammer or Blender, and the simple aesthetic makes some flow easy to learn with intuition.

This comp shooter is a hidden classic. With other fps games like COD or CSGO, you usually end up dealing with dying constantly to peaking corners, weapon skins you have to spend money on, or tons of toxic players. In this game, the pacing is a lot slower and more calculated, leading to skill coming from how well you time shots over how frantically you tap keys. It never feels unfair when you die, (unless it's a bot with a bow or the cannon on fof_depot) and it's a very rare breed of shooter where you can actually relax instead of trying to tense up more.

This is the worst physics engine I've ever seen in a game. Nothing is simple, everything makes me sick after 5 minutes of trying to wrestle with it when I don't know what it wants. This game feels like being drunk on the verge of alcohol poisoning.

Ok the game does get better toward the end, but the previous statements still apply.