Recent reviews by Artylo

The Finals is torn apart by its many contradictions: It is both fun and not fun the immediate next round. It is a carefully balanced clockwork mechanism of counters and synergies, but then some abilities let you move so fast and some weapons deal so much damage that "balance" doesn't even seem to be the word you'd wanna describe it with anymore. At the same time, some guns are so laughably inefficient at any range, that you can't help but think that there's something wrong with you whenever someone survives four point-blank shotgun shots to the midsection.

The game has that new-age competitive shooter sensibility, where the only pixel of your reticle that matters might as well be the one in the middle of your screen, and only if you're not in the middle of swaying, suffering from post-reload fatigue, your index finger's ligaments have rested sufficiently and you've achieved ideal stillness against the crashing waves of time and tide. Which is to say, I have never played a game that has so much faff involved with the usually simple act of pointing and shooting. Ideally, if the number that represents my current ammo is above zero, I have placed my cursor on the enemy, and I have pressed my mouse button - the shot will go exactly where it has been pointed. But in this new age of realism, it will go wherever the virtual barrel of my gun was point at for the three frames of animation that occur as the simulated sway of character movement and recoil affect the hairs on my moustache. Everything aims like a railgun, and all the other modes of targeting might as well be secondary.

Then, in the immediate next round, you'll barely fire a shot, spending all your time healing, taking some walls down because you'd like a more open-plan, placing traps, rotating turrets around, rearranging the furniture, moving some barrels around, and somehow win through sheer strength of interior decor.

Eventually, you'll stop and wonder who this game is for: Is it the speed-junkie teenager, who has just taken his entire prescription in one final gulp in order to put to practice all 2000 hours of beginner guides, watched over a femtosecond of real time at 1,358,892,119x speed, in which his neural pathways will chart a course through the three-dimensional space of holes in walls, broken ceilings, and dematerialized surfaces in order to secure one singular kill, rupturing his pre-frontal cortex as he narrowly escapes by turning invisible, only to walk into his own team's mines?

Is it for the guy who hasn't missed a single shot in the last twenty years of playing hardcore first-person shooter games, who suffers cardiac arrest the moment someone even mentions the words "skill-based matchmaking"?

Is it for the phlegmatic cantaimforshit guy in the back of the room, who is too busy building a zen garden out of barrels, turrets and loose chairs, who is still too engrossed in duct-taping their turret, and three different mines onto a throwable gas tank to notice that the fight has moved on to a completely different section of the map?

The truth is, it's kind of for all of them, and they all can't stand each other's guts. It's kind of a unique problem to have. If nothing else, it speaks to the originality and variety of the experience the game provides.

There's game-modes for people who want to be competitive and really show off how good they can train their aim, how precisely they can coordinate with their team, how many angles and power positions they can exploit. There are also modes for people who'd just wanna try and blow some people and buildings up, while trying to play for an objective, with little to no consequence on other players' experience. All the ones with unlimited respawn tokens are good in my opinion. That and the seasonal progression for the quickplay modes and the World Tour give you points even if you lose, and don't rank down ever, so it's all win-win.

The rewards you get for engaging in all of this range from being generous and creative to a recolour of a weapon that you don't even own and tacky street/tech/sportswear kitsch. There's at least five different progression tracks, all with their individual currencies, points, and rewards - the kind of thing that'd make a Korean MMO blush. I personally couldn't care less, but the good thing is that everything requires play to get. There's no way to buy the new weapons without sitting down and getting some matches in. It gives you a functional goal to work towards to at the very least, unless you're one of those people interested in that ultra rare green bucket hat that they keep dangling in front of you.

As of the latest season, they even let you disable hearing all the post-season-2 music tracks that would have you think the game has lost its attitude, and added Team Deathmatch into the already rich selection of game-modes to choose from. These are both good things, and have managed to sway my heart into getting back into this mess of a game. Which isn't to say that the next season won't ruin things again, and make everyone quit - it just seems like that's how things go for The Finals - good times, bad times. As of the time of writing, we're in the good times.

As the new mainline Monster Hunter game, Wilds is extremely underwhelming. It is, for the most part, a completely serviceable Monster Hunter game, in its own right, but offers nothing unique or interesting for new and returning players.

As of the time of writing, I have acquired 100% completion, with all awards and armour sets in both α and β variations, along with an eclectic mix of all available weapons. I can safely say that Monster Hunter Wilds has simply reduced and simplified everything unique to the series to such an extent that it offers no mechanical or intellectual challenge whatsoever. Travelling to the monster and gathering in preparation for the fight has been completely automated at this point, since it apparently doesn't matter. The weapon mechanics have been simplified and reduced to only a simple set of actions - bowguns especially, with the removal of the need to craft ammo, carefully reload, or equip specific skills in order to make the weapon work, rendering some ammo types, such as Spread, completely unusable.

The advertised open-world with dynamically changing seasons is nothing like you'd imagine. Monsters cannot move between different biomes, nor do the monsters' attacks and patterns change in any significant way, under the effects of time of day or the weather. All it means is that some monsters will only appear at certain times and under certain conditions, and that some endemic life and gathering spots will be more plentiful. That and a slight change in scenery. Anyone who has played or even heard of Monster Hunter Dos will know that this kind of system can be taken much farther.

The game introduces some controversial changes to primary gameplay systems, such as decorations, by giving weapons immutable innate skills and changing decorations to only work on weapons or armour, depending on their type. This means that, for the most part, very few weapons need any specific components, with all builds revolving around the same couple of pieces of armour and the same couple of generic damage-increasing decorations, only swapping out the decorations in he weapon to suit the type. This currently means that every single weapon is more or less using the same build throughout most of the endgame.

The recommended hardware specifications for the game is at best misleading, and at worst - completely inaccurate; with features such as Frame Generation actively contributing to instability and crashes, despite being necessary to maintain good performance. The game was not made with consideration for the default Windows page file size, and will constantly run out of virtual memory and crash, if it is not increased by the user. The game demands a constant sacrifice in visual fidelity to maintain performance, to the detriment of a game otherwise committed to providing players with impressive visuals as a main selling point.

Yes, the animations and the models are of a fidelity that is greatly improved from previous titles, but when I have to look at them through a grainy, dithered, low-resolution, neural-network-interpreted smudge, I can't help but think that all of those leaps in visuals are for naught.

Wilds is also host to the occasional bewildering and dysfunctional menu or UI element, as there are menus upon menus which one must navigate to accomplish even the most basic of task. Repetitive actions are interrupted by hundreds of confirmation prompts, short skippable cutscenes, and unskippable animations. Meanwhile accidentally exiting from several nested menus can be done with a single button press, sending the user back to the first menu in the chain, requiring all that menuing to be done all over again.

Despite the series' historical MMO-lite flavouring - WIlds is also a host to a new misguided attempt at an always online multiplayer system, which only serves to time-gate limited-time event quests and contribute nothing of value to the experience other than seeing other players in towns, but nowhere else.

Setting up a multiplayer party and going on a hunt with other people has never been more obtuse and convoluted, involving no less than five separate systems, including lobbies, squad lobbies, link parties, environment links and SOS requests - all with their respective restrictions, such as not being able to change biome, post quests, or joining crossplay parties. Crossplay itself simply does not work most of the time. Quests posted by players from another platform will often give all users a nondescript error message upon attempt to join, yet still appear in their quest lists, as valid and available for connection.

Undoubtedly, as title updates and the inevitable G-rank expansion come out, more features and patches will undoubtedly fix or improve upon some of my concerns. It is, however, insulting to think that until that happens, this game will be less feature-rich than every previous title in the series, as core features are yet again stripped only to be reintroduced at a later date. Instead of moving the series forward, it's taking a hundred steps back, only to reach where the series was already by the time the next game is supposed to come out.

As it stands now, this game is a middling experience, with a plethora of issues. I could not possibly suggest you purchase Monster Hunter Wilds any time soon, or dare I suggest, ever purchase a Monster Hunter game on release again.