Recent reviews by Cornelia Edgerton

Disappointed for the following reasons:

1. There is nothing "Shanghai" about this game. It's in the freaking title and the game description also highlights the setting of Shanghai. Yet the game simply doesn't depict or capture any vibe of the city. Not even superficially. Aside from swapping a few street names, you can literally transplant this game to any other city in the world.

2. The story is beyond bland and childish. I don't know if I'm getting old or have become numb over the years, but this kind of high school/college drama of dry melancholy, touchy sentimentality, and endless dirges of bygone youth is just not appealing to me. The narrative structure is confusing, to say the least, and the ending is much predictable.

3. There is no gameplay. It's a visual novel, so this is perhaps to be expected.

Cheap indie simulators are usually the type of games that make me wanna quit gaming. They always have interesting ideas on paper but are made half-arsed. This one, however, is genuinely a pleasant surprise.

As other reviews have said, this is basically Papers Please in 3D with real graphics (pretty good ones actually), cars, guns, shops and inventories, etc. You manage a border control post that can be upgraded to make your work easier and more efficient. Your main task is to check vehicles going through the border, looking at their IDs, permits, checking their cargos, vehicle conditions, making sure they adhere to all the entry policies that change as the story progresses - and of course, as the name suggests, a big part of your job is to search suspicious vehicles for contraband like illegal weapons, cigarettes, drugs, counterfeit money and so on. They can be hidden anywhere in the car or in the cargoes, and you need to use specific tools to crack them open. You get rewarded by performing accurate checks and penalized if you fail to turn back cars with problematic paperwork or arrest smugglers trying to bringing in contraband. There are also side quests that you do outside of the border post like clearing a gang point or rescuing a fellow police officer, etc. The money you earned can be used to upgrade your border control station, buy new police cars, buy guns, and more tools. So, basically that's the game loop. Overall it's designed fairly well I would say, very well paced, and keeps you wanna to continue playing. There is also a main story, which is bull$hit and really serves no purpose other than giving your some backgrounds and providing some excuses for the game to progress. To me, the biggest draw of this game is just the simple task of performing border control. It's the same game mechanic that makes Papers Please such an interesting game. There is something satisfying and soothing about methodically going through the paperwork, checking the cargoes and vehicle, and then applying the "Approved" or "Denied" stamp. Very immersive, indeed.

You also have radiant events like drivers forcing their ways, people trying to bribe you, midnight bandits attack, etc. Gun play is also not bad for a game like this. You can nitpick about how the game becomes a little repetitive towards the end, but for the price it asks for, this is an easy recommend.

One of the best games I've played in years. We all love our little indie games, but this one really gives you that blockbuster AAA magic that only big budget titles like this can bring. The graphics are jaw dropping still in 2023 and the scenes you play in, the places you visit, and the vistas you feast your eyes on are just something to behold. The characters are brilliantly written, charming and memorable. You know nowadays it seems like every character in every video game is a sarcastic smart-arse. This one isn't like this. Nathan, Elena, Sam, Sully, they are all great characters that you care about and relate with. Btw I'm playing the Harry Prick game at the moment, and the characters there, the little brats, are absolutely garbage in comparison.

If there is some weakness to this game, I'd say the gameplay can be repetitive at times. Climbing a cliff can be fun, but at some point you just keep smashing the A button with your eyes shut and hope for the next cutscene or shootout. The shooting, however, is fun. I must report that I probably had more fun shooting at people in Uncharted 4 than I did with the last few CODs.

One more petty gripe: this game suffers from the same ridiculousness that you see in the Tomb Raider series, Like, in these abandoned caves in the middle of the Indian ocean where nobody has visited for centuries, there just so happens to be some carefully placed crates out of nowhere just for you to use to climb onto a cliff or something. Like wtf... You just can't take the game too seriously. It's action-comedy. The story is decent but nothing to write home about. Typical Hollywood sort of story, a mixture of bull$hit and humour. Cliche as it may be, I feel it works well for this kind of game.

But overall, this one is absolutely worth the price and the time. I only played one of the two titles and I think I've more than got my money back.

This is one of the first VR games/applications that I tried when I first got VR and I've recently come back to it. Let me tell you this, if you are able to get the paddle position right (which takes some fiddling and adjusting) AND have a decently large play area, this feels UNBELIEVABLY realistic, visually and physically, to the extent that you'd question yourself what's the point of playing table tennis in real life anymore.

EA Origin is the most pointless and worthless piece of $hite that's ever been created since Jesus was born. It serves no purpose other than annoying you and making you wanna £cking wreck the EA headquarters for inflicting upon the mankind this disease worse than the bubonic plague.


Good game though, just ruined by a garbage of a launcher.

This game is atrocious. I lost 70 smackeroonies and 4 hours of my life which I'll never get back to see this. You don't have to.

The graphics are dull and unimpressive. People who said it looks stunning should have their eyes examined by a certified optometrist at their earliest convenience, because cataracts can develop at a young age and if you judge this game good-looking you are probably far advanced with your eye problems and I wouldn't wait any longer. The game doesn't look good, to put it simple. It's fake and unnatural.

The gameplay is so little and far between you may as well watch it as a movie. Speaking of movies, you should see The Banshees of Inisherin and The Menu. Both are great films and is coming to the theatre in a week or two. They cost you the price of a movie ticket and offer high quality, engaging entertainment. This game though has a 7-8 hour long boring campaign which probably has about 5 hours of cutscenes in it and 2.5 hours of sneaking around. The level design is so badly contrived you feel like you are playing mind games with the developer all the time, like 'should I go there?...do you want me to jump here or there?...can I use this weapon?...am I supposed to kill him first or them first?...'. Utter garbage.

This is without a shadow of a doubt the worst 70 dollars I've spent on a game in a very very long time. I now need to do some deep reflection on my judgement and taste in game to figure out on why on god's green earth I (or anybody else) would buy this disgusting piece of soulless crap. Please do yourself a favour and don't purchase it unless it's 95% off. No, £ck this. Don't touch it even if it's free. Worth neither your time nor the disc space it takes.

One of these games that defy any attempt to review it in an informative way - You need to be there in a VR headset to feel the magic of it. No reviews, including this one, can give you that feeling of crossing the boundaries of reality.

Granted, I've only played this game for an hour or so, so my opinions are probably worth little, but for anybody who wants to jump in this expecting a brilliant VR experience, the following maybe a deal breaker:

1. The hands - the most important things bar none when it comes to cooking - feel very odd and unintuitive in VR. They've implemented some kind of movement smoothing and the result is that there's a bit of lag and inertia when you move your hands, which completely breaks immersion because you just don't feel like these are your hands.

2. Also, the hands apparently have no collision effect, meaning you can't, e.g., close the oven door or the refrigerator door by just pushing it with your hand in VR. You have to move your hand to the handle area and pull the trigger on your controller to lock your hand to the door, then push it. Same with other objects as well, you always have to lock your hands on the thing or grab the thing to move it. Funny enough though, everything else in this game does have collision model, so you can close doors or move stuff freely with, say, a pan, but not your hand. Honestly, who came up with this stupid design choice? Why not make your hands a collision object like in, I don't know, EVERY OTHER VR GAME WITH HANDS IN IT?

3. Lacking basic physics. One of the first things I did in my kitchen is pouring a bowl of water on the stove with the fire on and see if it puts it off. No it doesn't. The second thing I did is dripping some water in a pan with piping hot oil in it, and see if it bursts like in real life. No it doesn't. Then I try putting my hand on the flames from the stove or touching a baking tray right out of the oven and see if there's any warning or penalty. None. Again, completely immersion breaking.

The game apparently is overwhelmingly well-received, so I'm probably in the minority who care about these petty stuff. I can't immerse myself and pretend to be a chef when these basic stuff just don't work.

This game has the most ridiculous stewards I've ever seen. You dare veer just slightly outside of the track area and you get a £ucking 'Unsportsmanlike Behaviour' flag and your lap invalidated, but two minutes later you got pit manoeuvred by an aggressive AI from behind and crashed into the wall which would probably kill you in real life. You know what that driver gets? Nothing. Oh yeah, he actually got the £ucking pole after ruining my race. So, barely touching the grass is unsportsmanlike but pitting someone from behind and causing them to crash is apparently not. What a load of horse$hit.

If this game did not excel so much in all the other areas and give me so much driving fun, I'd say stay away as far as you can from this utter disgrace of a racing game with the stupidest penalty system ever.

I'm pretty much done with this game. It's not been a boring experience, but certainly lacking the stimulus to make me do another 10 hours (or however long it's gonna take) to finish the campaign.

The main gameplay mechanic is as the title suggests - You live in a timeloop, whereby you wake up every morning living the same day on this island called "Blackreef", which is divided into four highly-detailed, extremely well-designed maps for you to explore. Every time you visit an area, time moves forward. You have 4 time slots to spend each day, after which you wake up on the next morning, hopefully equipped with more knowledge and better weapons than the day before. There is an overarching goal to achieve, which I won't spoil much but basically you need to defeat some sick scientists and "Break" the loop.

This mechanic worked fine for me in the beginning, but after about 15 hours it just got a bit repetitive, and I find myself simply not interested enough to keep on playing...killing the same enemies, traversing the same maps, looting the same loot. Sure, each loop is a little different, but still the sense of progression is not very satisfying.

The combat is supposed to be the forte of Arkane Studios and I remember quite enjoying the combat in the Dishonored series. The combat system in this one is also quite nice and offers a diverse set of approaches to deal with enemies and you can see the developer put a lot of thoughts into it. The point is (and that's just me), you don't need all these special abilities or fancy weapons. You can, I imagine, beat the game just using a trusty old rifle and shooting everybody. I, for instance, often forget to use all the special abilities (like teleport, invisibility, telekinesis, etc.) because you don't need them and you can perfectly beat your enemies by regular stealth and shooting. The awesome combat scenes in the game trailers didn't really happened to me in game a lot I would say. It's like one of those games where you need to create fun for yourself, so to speak, which is not my type...

What I truly like about this game is the visuals. This game to me is as much (if not more of) a visual experience as a gameplay/combat one. The graphics look absolutely stunning, and this otherworldly aesthetics mixed with a kind of retro-futuristic design style is just so visually satisfying to me. Really hope they'd have made the maps larger with more things to see and explore.

I'd still recommend it. The first 10-15 hours are without a doubt an extremely fun experience. It does fall a little bit after that with the repetitive game loop, but if you like the combat I'm sure it will keep you entertained to the end (and maybe it also has a great ending to the story as well, I don't know...)