Recent reviews by Amazing Mr. X

It's alright.

Jumping from 2015 to this was interesting.

There's certain parts of this that are strictly better: progression, the shop itself, the variety of vehicles, the varying locations. All of this is good. There's some new complexities in car tires which are functional, if rough, but much more clearly reflect actual reality.

Unfortunately some of these new systems really lack polish. Tires and rims added to the shopping list record their measurements from the car, but when you go to the actual purchase pages they don't auto-fill with these details and there's no way to access the shopping list to see this data. It's annoying having to find a place to jot down notes outside of the game for situations like this.

The official manufacturer DLC is also really odd in context. None of it is consistent with the fake lookalikes from the base game and their imaginary engines. For instance, despite a Nissan R34 lookalike with a fake RB engine being in the base game, the extremely common IRL RB engine swap isn't available for the Nissan S30 from the DLC. The same is also true of the lookalike Toyota Supra, whose IRL 1JZ & 2JZ engines are also popular swap options in many IRL vehicles. None of that real car culture carries over here. The same is also true of rotaries, from the Mazda DLC, which are also unavailable for swaps despite physically fitting into every vehicle in the game. The rotary engines are also arbitrarily missing common performance upgrades shared among other DLC vehicles, making these some of the slowest upgraded and tuned engines in the game. Notably, this is the opposite of how they perform and are utilized in real life.

The game also carries over some oddities from 2015 that it should have left behind. Chief among these are the original 2015 fake engines, which have not been significantly upgraded to improve their realism. Some of these look exceptionally out of place next to the actual masterpieces present in the Pagani and Porsche DLCs. The game also fails to understand the concept of a stud, mechanically, still only using the bolt attachment system from the base game. DLC engines which use studs have them oddly integrated, pre-built, into their individual components. Centerlock wheels from the DLCs are also completely misunderstood by the game, which treats them like standard multiple lug wheels with center hub caps. None of this is game breaking, but these are bad details to get wrong in a game about being a professional car mechanic.

The oddest design decisions come from the performance upgrades in the game. Supercharges and Turbocharges can't just be added to any vehicle or engine like they can IRL. They exist in the game, but only for completely separate engines that have to be entirely swapped to accommodate the performance bolt-on. These components also don't provide performance boosts by increasing effective engine displacement like in real life. Instead, they simply offer flat percentage-based increases of performance along with all the other "performance" components you can add to the vehicle. This leads to some very interesting situations that are the inverse of reality. Engines with more components like v12s get many more flat boosts than engines with single turbos. This causes huge engines to exceed 1000 HP without tuning and small turbo engines to struggle to improve performance versus their turbo-less counterparts. This is unintentionally hilarious for how poorly it reflects reality.

There's also some odd choices of what's available and not available for performance upgrades. If you asked most people with IRL performance mods what they did first to their car, aftermarket coil-overs would likely be high on the list. However, they aren't an option in this game. Meanwhile, performance power-steering pumps are readily available in the game's online shop for seemingly every car. I have no idea what a performance power steering pump even is, nor why it would positively influence horsepower. There's a lot of odd choices like this in the game. All clutches are single disc. Springs, retainers, and valves are all built into their heads. Wiring looms are completely omitted on new engines, but always partially included on engines with old-school distributors. In these cases, performance wire options which somehow influence horsepower are always available. Some turbo engines lack inter-coolers and some inter-cooler cars lack turbos. Kits to adapt carbureted engines to fuel injection and vice versa don't exist. Conversion of drum brakes to disc brakes are, likewise, not options even when parts to achieve this already exist in game. All cars also lack parking brakes, as either pads or shoes, and performance break pads are not an option even though performance rotors are. All of this makes the game come across as deeply silly at best, and oddly frustrating at its worst.

However, the oddest thing about the game is that it allows you to purchase, restore, upgrade, and tune vehicles with practically nothing to show for it. Fixed vehicles increase in value to net a profit, but tuning and painting vehicles do not further increase that profit. This would be fine if tuning and painting were their own rewards, but these mechanics are not particularly deep and there's not much to really do with the cars once you've gone through this. you can store the cars in an "alley" (effectively a storage unit), but you can't walk around the vehicles and experience them there. The game lacks online components for showing off builds to friends, and there's nothing equivalent to a car meet to showcase your skills and increase your visibility / business within the in-game car community. There is a drag strip and a race track, neither of which is directly indicated to the player, but the game's driving model is incredibly arcade-like for being a simulator. The two feel like very different kinds of experiences and I don't personally understand the cross-over enough to jump from one to the other. I'm here for casual car LEGOs, not high-octane racing action, and the game doesn't even attempt to hold your hand and guide you between one and the other. It's almost like it just threw all this at the wall in the hopes that something would stick. Maybe spending more time with the game will change my mind, but I can't say it currently makes a lot of sense as is.

Barn Finds, The Junkyard, and The Auction Houses are all fine mechanically but I wish they would learn some things from each other. Being able to walk around the auction lot, like you can in the other two settings, would be nice. Having variety to junkyard layouts, like the Barn Finds have, would also be great. It's weird how certain car parts are repairable and other ones arbitrarily aren't, but the mini-games that exist for dealing with these parts work well and are mechanically enjoyable, even if the premise behind them isn't rooted in reality. Speaking of reality, don't expect realistically simulated engine failures. Every part is rated on a 0 to 100% scale of how rusty it isn't, which is hilarious.

All of this is to say the game is good fun. It's silly, it misinterprets some things, and it's going to make some very technical people very frustrated, but it's mostly just good fun. There's no other game where you can place a 24/7 auto-repair shop on the side of Route 66 and have random people bring in their rusty Paganis for simple oil changes. It's a ridiculous and amazing rags to riches story starring you. It moves at your own pace, starting from a mechanic that can barely afford to change someone's oil and ending when you fill up your 5th mini-store-it with your private collection of rare Hyper-Cars and personally decide to call it quits. Make no mistake, there's nothing else quite like this. It's a unique game that does some lovely things, and it's a real breath of fresh air compared to a lot of what's out there. I hope the developers make some changes here, but what's present is still a fun time. Recommended.

it just doesn't look very good. This thing is filled with annoying visual design choices that the original didn't have. The Goo is a mirror, High Energy Pellets are brighter than the sun, every Vital Apparatus Vent or tube is made from a perfectly clear glass that's impossible to make out when you're made to walk on it, and there's a noticeable delay before the portals "connect" to each other that isn't in the classic game at all. On top of all this, a game that normally runs at nearly 300 FPS on a 3090 barely runs at 40 FPS here with DLSS in ultra performance mode.

All of this might be forgivable if the game was actually nice looking, but you'd be hard-pressed to notice significant differences between this and the original version without running the two back-to-back. Even worse, I can't say the visual changes made here are actually improvements to Portal's classic visual design. Nor are these changes visually appealing next to all of the in-game assets and textures that they just didn't bother to update at all. It's a mess all around.

Just play the original Portal instead. A triumph this is not.

As a VR game, Hellblade VR proves that you can add VR compatibility to any regular game without having to worry about motion controls and changing up the core gameplay experience.

As for the game itself? Despite many professional reviewer's insistence on extremely lengthy essay-like reviews to get across the value of this title, I find the game's merits to be both uncomplicated and easily understood. This is an alternate take on Norse mythology in a hack and slash story-driven single-player game, as seen through the lens of a main character with a mental illness that makes her perception of an already alien reality even more untrustworthy. Combine the unreliable narrator in this dark tale with solid gameplay that ramps up nicely as you progress, and you get a tense yet enjoyable experience that leaves you both guessing at the nature of how things will proceed and sure of your ability to overcome each new challenge.

TL;DR? Hellblade is a truly excellent game made all the better by VR. I highly recommend it.

Firewatch feels like the lull in the middle of some larger untold narrative. The choose-your-own-adventure style opening text unveils a backstory with more plot potential than the game's actual narrative, and the ending of the game implies consequences that have yet to be fully realized and could still conceivably come to a head if events were allowed to continue on. The main bulk of what you actually play is something of a muted thriller which morphs into an aborted murder mystery before abruptly ending. It's both more and less exciting than it sounds, largely due to the campy writing and clumsily disorganized structure of events.

Outside of the story, the game is a strange mash-up of early 2000s linear, corridor shooter design. You might imagine an open world, from what little marketing material there is, but it's actually just a well-crafted series of tubes that are surprisingly difficult to get lost inside of. All of the usual tropes are here too, inexplicable canyons, cliffs everywhere, heaps of impassable terrain, and mini-mountains shaping obvious paths around thick underbrush.

There's a surprising amount of gameplay here in sending out and answering radio hails as you hike along with a compass and a map as your guide, but this starts out about as challenging as it's going to get and becomes completely trivial by the end of the game. The term "walking simulator" feels a bit off here, as the game has got you doing a lot more than its competitors in that space, which is usually nothing, but it's ultimately not an irrelevant label either as you'll spend most of your time just hiking from one end of the game world to the other for arbitrary story reasons.

Really I wish I could recommend Firewatch, because the game is filled with the kind of potential I’d love to see fully realized, but the team behind it just didn't pull any of it off. It's simple, it's uncomplicated, and it ultimately doesn't give you much to walk away with. If you want to kill 4 hours doing something slow, then this is the game for you.

It just probably isn’t the game for most people.

A sequel to a series of celebrated RPGs that canned all of the celebrated RPG elements. More closely resembles a singleplayer Rust or ARK: Survival Evolved. Endless technical problems, broken framerate cap that just breaks with G-Sync activated, FPS over 120 breaks the entire game, spin around on the same inner-city rooftop and your framerate drops from over 100 to under 25, the list goes on. Joseph Anderson did a much better job tearing apart this sad excuse for a story than I or any other steam review ever could, look him up on YouTube for a detailed breakdown of everything wrong here that is infinitely more enjoyable than the game itself. Overpriced and terrible DLC can't hope to fix it all even after a pre-launch price hike, VR is coming out as a standalone $60 release without any DLC included and no discount for previous buyers, HD Texture pack is almost 100GB of performance-destroying files that look exactly the same as the base game's terrible textures, and the whole thing was only ever good as a platform for free mods from hobbyist developers that had some actual passion for making something.

Oh, and to top it all off? Paid Mods are now officially a thing, because that worked out so well for Skyrim the first time around.

I had posted a positive review of GTAV in the past but, as a developer, I can't be in support of a company that takes hostile action against a long-established modding scene. Modders are people that represent a pool of future employees, often with ambitions and talents exceeding those that simply submit résumés. Treating these people with open disdain and slamming them with legal action over their mods is abhorrent. The actions taken by this company clearly demonstrate a lack of concern for the future of the product, and the franchise itself, that is completely and entirely irresponsible.

Don't give these people your money.

Don't buy this game.