Recent reviews by Dan

As someone who's played League of Legends on and off since 2010, I'm very much enjoying this game. There are a couple of client bugs but I haven't encountered any in actual matches. Monetization is pretty fair too, most of the MTX are just cosmetics. There are even event-only skins that you can earn for free for just playing the game. The devs also give out a lot of free currency so it's pretty easy to get new characters without paying money. The only downside is that there are very few NA players (most of the playerbase is on KR servers). Hopefully more people start playing because there is definitely a lot of potential here.

DSP is markedly different from Factorio and Satisfactory. It has its own charm. What's interesting about it is that it's primarily a singleplayer game (though there is a multiplayer mod for it). I've only played other factory sims co-op though I'm not sure I'd recommend this one as a co-op game. I'm very much enjoying my solo time with it thus far.

I think it will be hard to go back to slower combat if the next game doesn't have the move variety and fluidity of Rise. I just wish the environments were as detailed as in World, but I understand that this is technically a port of a Switch game.

Having owned on both platforms, it's much more enjoyable on PC because of the higher resolution.

I'm updating my review now that I beat the game. Unfortunately, I still can't recommend it. I beat it because I got invested in the characters, but it was a rough experience. I think Days Gone would have made a very good TV show but it's not great as a game. I don't necessarily regret playing it but I don't think I would have bought it if I knew what I know now.

THAT SAID, I liked the characters so much that if Days Gone 2 were to ever come out, I'd probably buy it just to spend time with them again. I just hope that if that ever happens, they fix all the issues that made this one as big of a mess as it was.

(Note: not that it matters much but I played on Hard 2 difficulty.)

The good:
-Well-developed characters.
-Voice acting is very natural and convincing, cutscene conversations flow very well.
-Face capture is good.
-The story concept is decent (though the execution kind of fizzles out near the end).

The bad:
-Pacing is really bad: the game is VERY slow for a long time and you sometimes get 5 calls with new jobs back-to-back, including multiple calls from the same person. The game could have benefited from spacing these out a bit. There are also some nonsense quests that are required to progress the story even though they don't actually contribute to the narrative. The game sometimes tries to instill a sense of urgency in you but then gives you a bunch of tedious busy work before you can progress.
-The world is empty and uninteresting, random events boil down to finding items or running into enemies you need to kill. Most of these can be ignored. The one area I thought was interesting is largely empty and having to drive through it over and over made me dislike it over time.
-All the side quests are basically the same: go to place, kill some enemies.
-Sound design is not good. For example, enemies that are 50 feet away to your left sound like they're breathing down your neck right behind you sometimes.
-Incredibly buggy/sloppy game. Some things I've experienced: (a) enemy AI breaks and they become invincible to other enemies (you need to run up to them and melee them to kill them), (b) enemies you cleared respawn on top of you when you reload the game, (c) enemies get stuck in a loop (like getting up, kneeling down again over and over), (d) getting stuck in terrain, (e) objects not rendering correctly...I even had a WHOLE MOUNTAIN not render at some point, there was just a flat area and what looked like an invisible wall until I reloaded the game, (f) main character talking about doing tasks I've already completed, (g) main character repeating lines 5 times in a row, (h) objects getting stuck (e.g., gas can floats in mid-air).
-Survival mechanics are too tedious to be challenging. In the early game, you have a very small gas tank so all traveling basically requires you to fast travel to a refuel point first, fill up, and then travel to your destination. You have to do this after nearly every mission. It doesn't add any depth because you're never at risk of running out of gas as long as you keep to this strategy. In the endgame, zombie hordes require a lot of supplies to take down but some supplies are annoying to find. The best strategy is finding a place where the things you need spawn, gathering them, sleeping for several days until they respawn, repeating. Not very deep.

When you start the game, you feel like you're entering a game with a really good foundation. I spent 4 hours in the open beta, realized there was something enjoyable there, and stopped playing until the full release. Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit longer than that for the cracks to start showing and there really is no light at the end of the tunnel.

I'm not giving this game a thumbs down because it's a bad game, I'm doing it because it is so woefully incomplete. This game is in the equivalent of late alpha/early beta right now. It is nowhere near what a fully released product should be. The foundation is still absolutely enjoyable, much more so than many other MMOs I have tried playing. The weapon swings feel satisfying and not at all floaty.

As I was making my way through the game, I acknowledged that the quests were bland and that the PvP flagging system doesn't align with the type of world the game is trying to promote (for example, people can grief your resources in front of you and you can't retaliate because they aren't flagged for PvP). I told myself that this was all easily fixable and that the fixes will come with time.

Only later did I realize that almost nothing in the game works the way it's supposed to. Armor gives you bonuses to certain skills, but many of these bonuses do nothing instead. Light armor is supposed to give you healing bonuses but that also doesn't work. Some skills break if you unlock passives that modify them. Resistances provided by armor don't actually do anything (the game just checks if you're wearing light, medium, or heavy instead). Backstab bonuses apply to all critical strikes. Dungeon bosses can crash your game or soft lock you out of the entire dungeon run. World events can make your whole screen go black until you restart. You can make your character invulnerable to damage in PvP through easy-to-access exploits. Server transfers were released only to be disabled indefinitely within hours. The game's battleground, Outpost Rush, was also disabled since launch, reenabled, and disabled within hours because more bugs emerged. The list goes on and on.

This game needs a lot of work to become competent. Some of its issues won't bother you but eventually a few will. At this point, you will realize that none of them are "easy fixes" and that you'd have to live with them for a long time because something even more serious is broken and needs to be addressed first.

I look forward to trying this game again when the bugs have been addressed but I fear that there might not be a game to return to. There is just so much wrong that I doubt the player base has the patience to wait around.

This game just doesn't have any substance. Yes, there are some things you need to figure out but none of them actually seem to matter in the end. The twist at the end is pretty juvenile and absolutely not worth the time it takes to get there. If you're tempted, wait for a deep sale before picking it up because it's absolutely not worth $25.

Great game to have on your second screen while you're working!

This game has a lot of problems. The movement is clunky, there are plenty of puzzles that dragged on for seemingly no reason, and the main plot seemed entirely like a tacked-on afterthought. Buy this if you really feel like playing as Sherlock Holmes, I guess. However, there are plenty of things here that will probably bother you anyway.

Absolutely recommended. It's especially fun with a friend (or three). This is a game that's not about the outcome, but rather about the journey. If you're a person who just has to win, you'll have a terrible time. If you're a person that likes meaningful standoffs with other players, it's a wild ride. Even though there's only one map, the game feels different every round.

I haven't enjoyed anything this much since Left 4 Dead!

I really like the idea. I really wish I liked the game. However, the game lacks variety. If you fail certain missions, you lose the game. If you lose the game, you need to start over and repeat the same quests in order to get to the point where you failed.

On my second playthrough, I failed a mission because the character I needed to spy on didn't even show up within the time limit I was given!

If quests were randomized, I think this game would have a lot more replay value. As it stands, it unfortunately feels too punishing to be enjoyable.

Additionally, this game would have benefitted a lot from hotkeys, specifically the pause and fast forward buttons. If these exist, I didn't find them.