Recent reviews by eNoodles

FUСK activision

discord .gg/horizonmw

Great co-op fun with a friend if you have an extra controller, totally recommend it to anyone who's ever enjoyed a platformer. Pretty fun, addictive combat system and some cool gimmicks, especially when it comes to using the different dimensions and special attacks/moves for platforming puzzles.

Only problem is that it sometimes becomes a hassle when both you and co-op partner are trying to do the same puzzle and you keep messing each other up or going off screen. In those situations it's just more convenient to have the second player turn into a bubble that follows P1 and just let him do the puzzle in peace. The game gets pretty challenging near the end, but never too much. In fact, we beat the entire thing without realizing you could scroll down on the ability upgrade list in the shop and upgrade a bunch of other things (lol). Fairly short, but I'd say you definitely get your money's worth. Good times!

Oh boy, this was a very "iffy" one for me. I would've given it a medium rating, but because Steam only has thumbs up/down, I had to give it a no.

First off, the technical aspects. The game is capped at 60 fps, which I thought wouldn't be too bad, but for some reason the 60 fps in this game feels like fuскing 20. It literally makes me want to vomit. Ugh, just what the fuск. A 2014 shooter capped at 60 fps on pc... Now, you can uncap it by messing with the developer console, but do you think it ends there? Nope. By uncapping it, you're basically speeding up the game clock/speed. So everything is going to happen 2-3 times faster if you're getting fps in the 100s. You're also gonna get really bad screen tearing. I had to install a mod that allows you to set your own fps limit and fixes the game's speed, but there are still some parts of the game where having a high fps will actually break it (mainly acceleration of the flying drones and them flying through/under the map because of it), so the mod has a hotkey for you to set the fps cap back to 60. Also, the screen tearing never goes away, but I got used to it.

Another inexcusable technical issue is that I couldn't move after a cutscene/dialogue and was stuck in place MULTIPLE times. What the actual fuск? Like, ok, it happened once, maybe it was an isolated issue, maybe I was standing in an unfortunate position, whatever, but MULTIPLE times? Thankfully, usually restarting from the last checkpoint did the trick and let me move, but there were situations where even that didn't help and I had to reload the last checkpoint, run and slide at the person I had to talk to, then, just as I was getting up from the slide animation, activate the dialogue. That's just buIIshit.

Finally, my last "technical" gripe with the game was the graphics. I know this is subjective, and I usually don't care about these things, but, ugh, they just look so gross... and for 2014? The textures look like something from a modern mobile game. The characters and their faces look alright, standard stuff for a AAA 2014 game, but a lot of the environment textures look so blurry, washed out, low res, over saturated, and just plain ♥♥♥♥♥♥. And the game has kinda of a drab color scheme, which usually I don't mind, because I like depressing atmospheres, but in some instances the blurriness of the textures paired with colors made the game look cel-shaded, even thought it clearly isn't supposed to. Overall, it's not something that will ruin your experience and the graphics are definitely passable, but for 2014 this game really didn't look the part.

As for the gameplay, well, I found it very "meh". It's got good shooting mechanics and some interesting (albeit not really original) ideas. I did enjoy the energy weapons, dual-wielding, and secondary fire modes, but the level design really рissеd me off. It's all extremely linear, and even though it sometimes seems like there's a deviating path, there never is, and it leaves you feeling confused/disappointed. And it's not like the game is going for a super immersive, grounded experience like Metro either, where I was totally able to overlook the linearity and still really enjoy the game. It doesn't help that the game constantly pulls you out of the experience with unnecessary, laggy, prerendered cutscenes capped at 30 fps. They're extremely frequent and completely unnecessary, and again, it would've been so much better if the game took a Metro/Half-Life approach by showing you everything in-game, in first person. Nothing would have been lost. It really started to annoy me how much the game interrupts the gameplay and takes away control to show me something, even though I've been very much able to tolerate this in other games.

The difficulty was also poorly handled. 80% of the game was a walk in the park, but then in the last few levels there was a huge difficulty spike. I wasn't really prepared for it after breezing through everything else. In fact, some situations felt really unfair by just dropping in a miniboss or two to put you on your toes, while simultaneously surrounding you with a bunch of regular cannon fodder enemies and disorienting you. It just felt like there wasn't really a good flow. I actually got pretty frustrated and ended up finding ways to avoid confrontations entirely. Like near the end of the bridge level I walked along the edge of the bridge and got to the next checkpoint without the enemies noticing me, and in Deathshead's base I was able to stealthily get as close as I could to the button that was required to open the next door, then after activating it I just ran past everyone to get to said door. It felt kinda cheap, but so did the fights themselves. You could say I just need to "get gud", but in my opinion the game just lacked a proper flow towards the end.

I did have some minor gripes with the story, but nothing really worth criticizing/pointing out.

To sum up my criticism:

• 60 fps cap that requires a mod to uncap without breaking the game
  
• Annoying glitches that prevent movement
  
• Ugly textures
  
• Intrusive, unnecessary cutscenes
  
• Disappointing level design
  
• Poor enemy flow/difficulty towards end-game

Other than that, it's an alright shooter. I'll be checking out the second one sometime in the future, because I'm curious about what happens story-wise, but it's not really high on my prioritized list of to-play games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Singleplayer review)

Let's get straight to the point: you're getting this game for the combat. The story is mediocre at best, and all of the side missions have nothing to do with the main plot. There are some pretty interesting and cool places to visit, but I wouldn't suggest completing every single one of them as I did. Once you get the option to go to the academy and continue the main story, go for it. Don't worry, you won't be missing out on force powers. You'll have more than enough anyway. (Apart from the default ones you unlock automatically) I ended up only using heal, protect, and absorb. I never really saw a point in using the dark side powers, but I guess you could have some fun with grip.

So how is the combat? Well, you have to understand some of the intricacies to really get the hang of it and appreciate it. If you're a new player and have no idea how it works, you'll be confused for some time as to why you suck so much. If you never do get the hang of it, you might even think this game's combat really isn't as good as people make it out to be. But once you do understand how it works, it really does become quite fun. However, due to the lack of saber-wielding enemies in the beginning third (maybe even half) of the game, it'll seem extremely easy. Don't let that fool you, it does get a bit more challenging once most of the enemies you face on missions are reborn/dark jedi, especially when you encounter saber-staff guys and/or multiple enemies at once. But you do have to get through the easy first half of the game to get to the good bits, which some might find quite boring. Although I haven't tried them out myself, I know there are a lot of mods/custom maps for this game, so you could try those and see if you enjoy the combat of this game or not. I really suggest looking up some youtube videos.
(Personal tip: Always hold down shift when you engage an enemy to slow yourself down and make your attacks more precise. I haven't seen people mention it in videos, so thought I would share)

What about graphics? They definitely look dated, but nothing too bad. Personally, I was totally fine with how the game looked. The worst offenders of looking like ♥♥♥♥♥♥ are some of the environments and the animations. Some of ground textures just look super undetailed and flat, and the actual shape of the terrain can look very low-poly. Animations (specifically in cutscenes) often looked somewhat jitter-y and stutter-y to me, but that could be an issue on my end or, perhaps, the game running at too high of a framerate. But, overall, while not too bad, I don't think it looks as good as KotOR, which came out in the same year.

Ultimately, if you don't like the lightsaber combat in this game, it really doesn't have much else to offer. But if you decide to try the game out for your 2 hour refund timeframe and you do enjoy the fighting, then I definitely would recommend playing through it. The gameplay elements don't feel super dated, and it's definitely quite a unique game in the sense that there isn't really any Star Wars game like it (in terms of saber combat), apart from Jedi Outcast, the previous entry in the series.

I don't think it's really necessary in 2018 to tell you this is one of the best games to play with friends (or even solo). Not just for the loot- but for the story, the characters, the world, the style and art direction of it all. While I did enjoy BL1's atmosphere a fair bit more, BL2 made many QOL improvements and a much more cohesive and engaging story.

Now, as for my thoughts atm:
I imagine experiencing Pandora in VR will be really fun and all...
but give us Borderlands 3 already dаmmit!!!

This game is amazing. The story, the world, the atmosphere, the characters- it's all great. You really feel like you're in the Star Wars universe. I really have to put an emphasis on characters and story, because for some reason I wasn't expecting too much (I was expecting something like the prequels), but it's soo good. Especially if you play the game the canonical way (LS male). The combat and character stat systems may seem a bit overwhelming at first, (especially if you've never played games with similar combat systems) but by the time you're deep into the game it'll be fairly easy and satisfying except for a few really challenging moments.

If you're worried that the game hasn't aged well, I'm 15 and havent played many older games (although I feel like I'm going to now) and I really had a great time with this game. I'm not saying that's gonna be the case for everyone, but just keep that in mind. The only BIG con for this game is the resolution. Getting it in HD or widescreen is such a pain in the аss, and even once you get it working the menus are really small. I ended up playing the entire thing (plus Brotherhood of Shadow, probably the best fanmade dlc I know) in 800x600. It's actually not that bad; it's not like running a modern game in 800x600, probably because the game was designed for that resolution, but it would be nice if they updated this game to have 1080p like they did for Kotor 2. I might try to play this one in HD on my second playthrough because I already know how everything works and I don't care about the menus being small. If that sounds off-putting to you, I'd still suggest you give it a try and if it really bothers you just refund the game.

But overall I highly recommend this game.

To sum it up shortly- pretty much everything that could be improved upon from Shadow of Mordor they made better. Also bonus points for optimization because my now medium-end gaming laptop has been struggling with newer games but handles this well without having to sacrifice much visual fidelity.

Edit: Right, the microtransactions. They're so pointless I completely forgot to mention them the first time I wrote this review. Yes it's BS but don't jump on the hate train and miss out on this awesome game. And they're not game-changing like some other SP games (yes, sp), they just take away from the game itself. If you like the game itself and it's mechanics, shadow wars will not be a grind for you. For me, it's like the first 3 acts were the easy-to-normal difficulty story-based part of the game, while the shadow wars were then the more gameplay-focused slightly more difficult part.

Takes some gameplay elements from AC and the Arkham games and makes them into a better game imo. Fans of the combat from previously mentioned games will enjoy the very satisfying and swift yet brutal feel of the combat in this game. The story missions and engaging nemesis system dont get in each other's way and for lotr fans (not scholars) the story is actually pretty well done. If you enjoy the feel of the Jackson films and know little tid bits of lore (but do not study it like a religion) you will actually find it fairly interesting (like me), although not very memorable. I can see why people who dont know much about the lotr universe or, like Ive previously mentioned, study it very carefully, would not enjoy the story, however, even with that said, the nemesis system is engaging enough to still justify giving this game a try. Only major cons for me are the ghuls (enemies that are both annoying and boring to fight) and the game world (althought unlike many I actually like the way it looks, I just think it needed a bit more variety). So to sum things up: this is the best lotr game out there and the combat feels like a much more swift and brutal reiteration of that of AC and Arkham (maybe its just the fantastic animations), the nemesis system will keep youe engaged for a while, and the story is atleast presented very nicely, Definitely recommended.

Great ♥♥♥♥ with friends

Ton of fun co-op with friends, only downside is you have to fix your steam mic input because you cant disable it in-game