Recent reviews by Zel

Okay so, this is a fun game when you play it (with friends) in short bursts (couple of matches) but it's definitely not worthy of the "overwhelmingly positive" reviews it has recently, and probably not even the "very positive" overall.


On the store page it says "It's a bit ridiculous. Unlock, upgrade, and master over 200 unique power-packed weapons"

The only ridiculous part is that you have to unlock all of those weapons and after playing this for 5 hours I've unlocked ~50 out of ~400 weapons. The grind is huge and it makes you feel like you're playing some of the recent cash grab triple A/mobile games where they implement huge grinds just to milk you out of your money.

And the strangest part is...there is no micro transactions in this game... so they're not trying to scam you out of your money? So why put this huge time sink then? At least keep the grind for skins/maps but not for the weapons. When you buy small games like this you don't plan on playing them for hundreds of hours, core content shouldn't be locked.

If you go into the server list ~50% of all servers will be XP farming games, that really shouldn't be the case.

You can't even test locked weapons in the Firing Range


So yeah, this has to be a negative review even though the game is not terrible just to balance things out and give people another point of view since somehow i haven't seen many people mentioning this yet.


TL:DR
It's basically like the old indie game Pocket Tanks Deluxe, improved in most ways with one gigantic flaw (locking weapons behind a huge grind). That flaw makes Pocket Tanks Deluxe more worthy of your time.

It's good, but it's definitely worse than the original.

Primary reason for it being: the level design.

The level design is noticeably worse (or just "different", depending on who you ask).
In comparison to the original there are waaaaay too many big open areas in majority of the levels. And sadly this negatively affects the gameplay in a major way.

So yeah, the level starts:

On the first few attempts, you'll get killed from off screen because you don't know enemy locations. Then you'll die some more because there's a million windows everywhere.
Okay, now you know where the enemies are and where the windows are. Well, the problem is, because these open areas are so big it's hard to "get onto an enemy". So unless you want to suffer by trying a dozen different strategies to approach and melee (and then find out that they don't work), you'll suffer because your gameplay will become:

See an enemy
Realize it's too far away for melee
Find the nearest corner/door and strafe in and out/around it until the enemy notices and runs to you
Repeat

which takes forever and isn't satisfying.

Quickly you'll realize that the solution is... just use melee as little as possible. Stick to guns for 90% of the encounters and basically glue your pinky to shift and you're good to go, for real.
Well, the issue with that is the fact that melee combat is the most satisfying part of the game, the gun play is not trash but it's definitely miles behind melee. There's a good variety of melee weapons (although i think less than in the original) and there's many different kill "animations".

So yeah, you're "forced" to use guns and that makes the gameplay feel worse. In the original i almost never felt the need to use guns.

And yes don't get me wrong, dying and trying is at the core of the game and it can be fun. But dying is just not fun when the gameplay consists of getting killed off screen and strafing left and right around a corner/door to get 1 enemy to chase you. You can clear all the levels with melee only but at times it'll be absolutely infuriating.

When it comes to the story, it is too convoluted for my taste. It is intriguing but either i'm too retarded or it's actually too hard to follow what's going on. In comparison to the first one which was also intriguing and a bit hard to follow at times, in this one you'll also constantly switch between plethora of characters which have different story lines and on top of that you'll be thrown around different time periods between 1985-1991. So having played through this game twice i still have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue as to what happened, while the first one i think i kinda understood.


I've had a similar mildly negative opinion the first time i've played this game on release but having replayed both the original and this one back to back, it has definitely been greatly amplified (although i've played the game on hard this time around so that might've made me feel worse about the game).

Most of the levels in the original would consist of one house with multiple small rooms. You'd get in, murder everyone and get out in a span of 3 seconds and then you'd go to the next room. That felt extremely satisfying. This one in comparison just feels like a slog at times.

Nevertheless this is still worth playing, it's not a miserable experience the whole way through, there are sections which are as good as the original, just don't expect it to be good throughout the whole game, as was the original.

The soundtrack is really dope though, just like in the original and there's many more songs, so that's very nice.

And to think a dlc ending surely couldn't get more emotional than main game.

This plays a little bit differently compared to all the previous installments with a focus on stealth and evading combat altogether, which in my opinion was quite refreshing.
Story wise it tries to connect Infinite and Bioshock 1. (it sets up the stage for it's events)

If you weren't a fan of Infinites story (you thought that it was a bunch time travel ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ filled with plot holes) you surely won't enjoy this either because it will feel forced and nonsensical, existing just to tie the two games together.

I've suspended my disbelief and have thoroughly enjoyed Infinites story and in my opinion this one was also very enjoyable (and much better than episode 1). As long as you've liked Infinite for it's story this is a must own, it will tie everything together and wrap it all up.

So yeah, if you didn't enjoy the story in the main game or want the same gunplay as in the main game, skip this. On the other hand if you've liked the story, definitely get this.

Play the original, this junk crashes every 5-30 min, you might think it won't crash for you, but i assure you it's not worth the risk. If it does crash, finishing the game will be the most annoying thing you've ever done.

While there are some nice ideas here and it has potential to be great, Typhon Hunter is not worthy of your time in it's current form.

Gameplay is very basic and the settings are barebones.


There's no graphics settings except presets, no borderless fullscreen, no key rebinding, no text chat and no push to talk (in a game where your success depends on communication).
Yes there's voice activation, but being limited to that option and also not being able to mute people is terrible.
All the physics objects/props are rendered at like 15 fps or something, the rest of the screen is smooth but all the props stutter about making movement as a mimic inside a prop pretty difficult.
In this 1 hour that i've played i've already crashed once and got disconnected from the server twice.

You could say "well this is just a minigame and the technical aspects don't matter"...and i disagree but okay, let's say they don't (except push to talk, you really need that).


So how's the gameplay?

Well, when you start your first game you'll notice that there's 0 tutorials. "Thankfully" since the game mode is very simplistic you'll get a hang of it quickly, but really this game should've had some prompts explaining how things work.

The 2 main problems with gameplay are:
1. Lack of maps, there's only 3 of them and they're very small.
2. Mimics are just too under powered compared to Morgan, if Morgan knows what he's doing and the mimics aren't extremely organized, mimics will never win.

There's no penalty for Morgan spamming attacks, Morgan can just sprint across the map hitting every object he sees without having to wait for stamina regen like in the main game.
Mimics can't attack outside of props and while inside a prop they can only attack Morgan after he stood next to them for a few seconds. If Morgan knows what he's doing that'll never happen and even if it does happen and mimics kill him, he respawns in 5 seconds.
Mimics can only be inside a prop for a certain amount of time (1 minute or less) after which they need to pick up a power-up which gives them extra prop time. Sadly, when they move around they make noise and since the maps are so small Morgan can relatively easily pinpoint their exact location.
Even if Morgan isn't good, halfway through the game he can get a power-up that reveals mimics inside props...and at that point it's game over for the mimics.

Surviving the whole round (5 min) as mimics is way too hard when Morgan can suicide + respawn time after time without any consequences.


Yes there are fun moments to be had here and there, especially with friends, but with only 3 maps and unrefined gameplay this game mode gets old veeeeeeeeeery quickly.

Prey seems like the perfect game for a prop hunt mode...if this was a fully fledged feature with fixed technical issues and revised gameplay. But, as of right now, this feels like a rushed minigame (even though it was even delayed by like 3 months) that was released just to fulfill the promises the devs made when they announced Mooncrash.

This one is just as good or better than it's predecessor in every way except it's technical aspects and maybe the story.

There's more non-lethal options.
There are multiple characters to play as, with different spells and dialogue.
There's a greater variety of spells and perks to choose from.
You can customize your difficulty: footstep noise, enemy perception, health regen, damage and much more.

Even though the first ones replayability was high, with the addition of new game+, custom difficulty, even more spells to choose from and craftable bonecharms that stack up to 4 times, D2s replayability surpasses the original.
A single playthrough of D2 took me significantly longer than D1 while trying to explore the levels as much as i can (although that might be different for others).

There are two levels which are really innovative and stand out from anything i've seen before, one of those you can see in the trailer of the game a house which can rearrange it's walls and change it's layout at a press of a button, and the second one lets you explore the same level in two time periods, letting you phase between the two at your will.

The main negative i have with this one is the story, more specifically the villains, which you basically meet for the first time and dispose of during the same level, so there's little incentive for you to care about them at all, yes there are story bits scattered around in the logs/books that flesh them out but still. Compared to D1 where most villains you meet and get to know between every mission, in the pub D2 feels worse.
The outsider feels different, in a bad way, they've changed the voice actor so it's probably that, but he just feels completely different compared to the first game and doesn't convey the same emotions.

And of course, the technical problems, having played this 2 years after release, it wasn't as bad as for some others in the past but still, the game crashed twice.
The main technical problem for me is that the sound would randomly cut out/muffle in some instances. I'd listen to a guard conversation and just rotating the camera or slight movements would completely muffle the sound. Same would happen when my character would talk. It might not seem like much, but when it happens multiple times every minute it can get quite annoying. To me this was a major drawback from enjoying the game for the first few hours until i got used to it. It's a widely known bug but even 2 years after release it still hasn't been fixed.

Apart from those negatives, there's not much reason not to try this one especially if you're a fan of the original.

Having replayed this recently i'd say this is still worth playing 6 years after release.

Visually it has aged pretty well because of it's focus on style and not realism.
Gameplay wise it feels just as good as it did years ago and doesn't feel dated.
Movement is quick and responsive, levels are expansive and with many ways to approach the objective.
Solid story with lots of story bits scattered throughout the levels in the form of NPC dialogues or books.

On top of that, it has HUGE replay value, usually i don't tend to replay games unless i've really really liked them, but this one just wants you to play it again. You simply can't experience the full game in one run, you most probably will not use all the gadgets at your disposal. On the next playthrough you can take a completely different route, try new gadgets/spells, go lethal/non-lethal (which will affect how the characters/world around you reacts to you), spare differrent characters to affect the story , not use powers at all etc...lots of possibilities.

Minor complaints:
I've felt like my full lethal playthrough was much more fun than the non-lethal, mostly because your non-lethal options are limited to choking the enemy and using sleep darts.
Face to face melee combat feels shallow.
Good ending forcing you to be very limited when it comes to how many characters you can kill.
Lack of new game+.

I would also based on my experience really recommend not to focus too much on beating the game without killing anyone on your first run, you are not familiar with the levels and will spend loads of time reloading the game which can become quite tedious, just go with the flow for your first run and do a pure no kill run on a subsequent playthrough.

For fans of Deus Ex, this is a must play, yes the world setting is the completely different, but gameplay wise these two are extremely similar.
Would also recommend it to players of games like Thief, Hitman and to some extent Bioshock.

If you prefer being guided through the levels or/and don't like being overwhelmed with options and just want a linear experience, this probably isn't for you.
For everyone else it's a must try.

Looks and sounds beautiful, but when it comes to "gameplay" the only interaction you're going to get out of this game is typing in the puzzle solution. You'll be solving puzzles either with pen and paper or in some notepad since there's no ingame system for puzzle solving.

There's a variety of cryptographic puzzles (6 categories in total + a group of puzzles which require "skills" learned in the other 6 categories) of increasing difficulty and a lot of these puzzles are very very hard, i've only done 34% (less than 15 puzzles) in my 9 hours played.

So really, is Cypher worth buying or not completely depends on if you mind paying for a collection of puzzles with no gameplay attached accompanied by a beautiful classical music soundtrack and a short info/wiki about the types of cryptographic problems you'll be solving.
To me that wasn't an issue and i've enjoyed this experience a lot, but i can easily see how someone wouldn't want to pay 5e for that. You could probably find these cryptographic puzzles online and get (depending on who you ask) the same/similar experience for free. Compared to some other games by this dev, this game doesn't have a lot of "game" to it and that might turn some people off.

Unless you like half the game being cutscenes to a bad story that you couldn't care less about and the other half being one big quick time event, don't bother with this.

Saw this game when it released but it didn't look interesting and was criticized for it's gameplay, but then lately i've started seeing all these positive reviews and decided to give it a shot.
And i have to say that i'm amazed at the amount of people that thought this game is worth your time, let alone your money.


It's ~5 hours long and out of those 5 hours you're going to get maybe 3 hours of gameplay, the rest being cutscenes. And out of these 3 hours of gameplay 2 hours is going to be you doing the QTEs.

Which means that, as you can guess, the gameplay is barebones. Outside of QTEs you only have a single attack while the other "attack" is there just to break enemy blocks. So you'd think "hm, well maybe they did something really good with the QTEs to make up for the paper thin combat". No, not really, it's the standard QTE system with only 2 buttons that you have to press, and even though there's quite a bit of different QTE animations it doesn't really matter. Because even if you have 40 different animations they won't entertain you if you have to endure them ~500 times. And you can't even fail at them, even if you don't press anything or press a wrong button, you'll still successfully execute it, you'll just get less points for your upgrade system.
The QTEs in something like God Of War were spread apart far enough and looked incredible, which made them work well, in Ryse there's so many of them that the whole gameplay loop just fall flat on it's face.

Except swordplay and QTEs, the only other things you do are:

1."Command" your troops, which consists of you pressing 1 button (obviously, only when you get told to) and your troops group around you/focus a target...all in all extremely basic.
2. Use ballistas to shoot enemies (the ballistas have 0.3 seconds reload so using them feels more like using a semi automatic rifle than a ballista :) ).

So what else does Ryse have?

Oh, yes, it has an upgrade system, which is (just like the rest of the game) extremely shallow and they really should've just thrown it out the window. Upgrades consist of you upgrading your hp and your focus bar(resource which you fill by fighting) and unlocking even more animations for the QTEs.

It also has story and characters that are there to put you to sleep, while you recover from the suffering you've endured through combat.

The only enjoyment you can honestly get is the slowmotion mode which you use when you've got enough focus.

Ryse also has multiplayer, although i haven't bothered with the multiplayer so i can't give an opinion on it.

A few more things i've noticed.

There was a lot of stuttering in the 4th chapter, even though neither gpu nor cpu usage was maxed.
As with most games, on first boot you get asked to setup your brightness, well, this game is no different, but it doesn't let you change the brightness, it just shows you a brightness window and expects you to change your monitor brightness instead.


So yeah, all in all Ryse doesn't deserve all the positive reviews it's got. Skip it and play other more competent games. While there might not be a lot of hack and slash games set in this time period, suffering through this just for the sake of seing a game set in Roman Empire isn't worth it.

Right, so.
This one plays just like the original, if you didn't like Tomb Raider (2013), no reason to like this either. If you've liked the original, this one is more of the same, except for the setting and the story.

For anyone new coming to the series, i see a lot of positive feedback so clearly people are enjoy something here, and you might aswell, but i really wasn't impressed so i'll provide you with some mostly negative feedback as caution before you make the decision to buy this, because it might not be for you, just like it wasn't for me.


The game is gorgeous, a few years back i thought the first one looked great but this one is on a whole other level of beautiful. Foliage, snow, effects on skin and clothes, lighting, weather effects. Lifelike animations both during gameplay and cutscenes. From a visual technical standpoint Tomb Raider nails absolutely everything. And that's mostly where greatness ends.

As far as gameplay goes, Tomb Raider is mediocre, most of the mechanics are extremely polished (except for shooting) but stripped down to their basics. You gather and craft, you platform, you shoot/sneak/stab.

Platforming, while great on the surface: movement feels snappy and responsive (on a controller), as the game progresses you get more fancy tools to explore new areas, all the jumps connect perfectly and there's a lot of different types of objects and terrain to traverse.
Suffers from the feeling of the game playing itself, there's no choices when it comes to how you approach platforming sections, there's no wiggle room to find your own way of reaching some place (everything is scripted), some jumps feel as if the game gave you a speed boost just so that you'd make it across.
The best examples of these points are the "playable cutscenes", events where you're escaping a collapsing tunnel/avalanche/enemies etc.. where there's no QTE on the screen but it basically is a disguised QTE because you're forced to press a very specific sequence of buttons or you're dead.

Combat, as far as i'm concerned stealth takedowns + bow and arrow combat is ok and satisfying while the gun combat is trash. Gunplay is basic, the weapons feel samey and aiming with a mouse feels horrible, combat isn't helped by the AI being borderline braindead. It takes enemies way too long to react to you closing in on them and they can't shoot for ♥♥♥♥. You can literally beat the game with no upgrades whatsoever on keyboard and mouse and if you opt to use a controller (which i would recommend for platforming sections because it feels great) it's still extremely easy as long as you upgrade your toolkit a bit. Late game combat is hilariously stupid, you just spam bandages which makes you literally invincible enabling you to tank ~5 or more enemies, get in their face, shoot them from point-blank range and repeat, it requires zero brainpower.

Gathering and crafting is just like in any other game, hold x to get material, click to craft, boom, done. It would've been better if the upgrades you craft mattered, but except for carrying capacities everything feels kinda pointless (which stems from the combat being ♥♥♥♥ and easy), the best part about crafting is just looking at how the model of the thing you've upgraded changed.
So yeah, it's passable, nothing really special but not terrible.

So if the above points don't sum up to Tomb Raider being a good game what is it about it that makes it a worthy experience then? We can agree that Tomb Raider was never about combat anyways, so.

Is it the story?
Well, as always, story opinions are highly subjective, but as far as i'm concerned the story is complete ♥♥♥♥. You and some secret society are looking for this source of immortality, the secret society with endless resources ofcourse can't deal with one person. You, an archeologist are actually rambo 2.0 that is able to kill hundreds of elite soldiers. You get help from the english speaking natives in Siberia, the leader of the natives is..."unexpectedly"(lol) a demigod or something . The villains...they're basically cartoon villains, especially the male antagonist, some of the ♥♥♥♥ he says... i.e. "when we're done here we will rule the world" "this is gods will, our success is inevitable" ...super cringey.
It takes itself very seriously, but really it is just laughable. I can't name a single character a month after playing the game.

Is it the sidequests?
No, the side quests don't give you any insights into the characters or the main story (not like you would care anyway), you're just helping the natives with their problems and are only really doing it for the rewards (upgrades for your toolkit, which are once again pointless, because the game is really easy).
So all in all, sidequests feel like most mmo fetch quests.

Is it the tomb raiding?
Well, i really hoped so, but sadly, even though there's a bit more of them here than in the previous game, the tomb puzzles are way too easy. The tombs themselves are great visual setpieces...but that on it's own doesn't really mean much. I don't think there was a single puzzle where i had to stop and think for more than a couple of minutes...but hear this...even if you wanted to think, Lara flat out almost tells you what you need to do if you get stuck i.e "Mm i think i should connect this rope to this pole".
The tombs should have way more puzzles in them, the current tombs feel as if you're solving one easy puzzle per tomb, instead of being a collection of semi difficult puzzles.

Collectibles?
As all games these days need to pad their playtime, this one is no different.
Your map is a bloated mess of markers showing relics, documents and maps which pinpoint where more collectibles are (basically gating your progress and increasing time played).
While finding relics with some backstory attached to them makes more sense in tomb raider than in shadow of mordor, it still falls flat for me just because i was so uninterested in this world because of the ♥♥♥♥ story.
But, if you like to 100% games, you'll have plenty to do.


Some smaller negative aspects

Backtracking, unlocking more gadgets as you go through the game is nice, but way too many collectibles and even tombs are locked behind these and you get straight up told "can't reach this area without x"

Forgetable soundtrack, the only song i remember is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGvM1MB5joI and the reason for that is, everytime the game thought something epic and dangerous was happening on the screen it would play this song, but really, usually it was extremely out of place.

Don't be stupid like me and play this on the highest difficulty, because even though the combat is easy, you'll still die by missing jumps on platforming sections and the devs thought that the best way of implementing difficulty is by making so that you can only save the game at campfires.

While you play you get points with which you can buy cardpacks, at first i thought it was something for the singplayer, but ofcourse the system was there to get me to buy microtransactions for their co-op mini game :), no thanks.


So, who is this game for?

It's not for the people that like well fleshed out combat or difficulty, it's not for the people that like any resemblance of difficulty in puzzles.
It's mostly for people who like platforming and looking at beautiful environments+setpieces, with some very light combat and crafting.

To me, that's not enough, to make it worthwhile it needs to have atleast good story. But in the end, what do i know, a lot of people seemed to like the story so..

My memory might be twisted but as far as i remember the old tomb raider games focused more on exploration and puzzle solving rather than combat and crafting+survival.
This one tries to do all of these to get a bigger audience, but mostly failed at the exploration and puzzles part.

If the next entry in this series is what we've sacrificed the next Deus Ex game for, i am very dissapointed.