Recent reviews by SkoomaTime

Pros:

+Visual part. I liked the environments, both from art and level design perspectives.
+ I like how they wrote BJ in the first part of the game. You can feel him trying his best not to literally fall apart while trying to help the cause.
+ Shotgun and Axe.

Cons:

- I don't like the writing in general. I feel like the devs tried to "sit on two chairs" at the same time. On one hand, they condemn nazis for an inhuman amount of unjustified violence, on the other hand, they glorify the violence too. Yeah, I get it, nazis are the scum of the Earth, but the way that this violence towards them is being glorified gives me the creeps. I guess it's because all of this is being presented as a fun, albeit bloody, comedy.
- Humour is not funny.
- No likable characters that you can sympathize with. Even BJ "worked" for me just for the first part of the game.
- The game doesn't know what it wants to be from the story perspective. Is it a comedy? B-class trash and gorey story? A drama?
- Game was broken by some patch that probably will never be fixed. Had to drastically lower the settings to be able to play and I still get the error. At least I didn't have crashes like other players.
- AI. It's not that smart really, and it constantly spawns behind your back. Can't even imagine what it's like to play above normal difficulty (I played with a controller).
- The ending is rather disappointing.

TL;DR

The message on the surface is good and understandable. But the way it's being told in this game feels like some corpo-dudes tried to cash in on that idea. And that is a real shame.

A solid franchise-based AA title.

I've watched Terminator 2 a hundred times when I was a kid. And I've got to say that this game sits close to it in terms of atmosphere. Post-apocalyptic experience on the ruins of human civilization.

Pros:

• Great atmosphere, true to the first two movies.
  
• Awesome music, again, true to the first two movies.
  
• Terminators give you the creeps at some moments. As it should be.
  
• Decent challenge on normal difficulty (played with controller).
  
• Liked the overall sound design. Mainly because of the pew-pew-pew that plasma guns make :) Just like in the movies.
  
• Night levels! The atmosphere...
  
• The story gets a bit dark at times as it should be.
  
• The ending is...well, you've gotta see it for yourself.

TU-DUN-TUN-TU-DUN. TU-DUN-TUN-TU-DUN.

Cons:

• AI is rather stupid.
  
• Some parts of the game are a bit boring at times.
  
• Character (human) animation is not good. That being said, don't forget that it's AA title.

Overall:

Good AA shooter, that reminds me of Metro (but with a lesser budget) at times. Plus, it's close to the source material. If you like old Terminator movies, this game is a must-buy.

Atrocious AI ruined the game for me. If you plan on playing it on stealth, just forget about it.

P.S .Throw away your tranquilizer gun too. It's useless.

mildly infuriating online shooter for millenials :pops some pills:

Note: Don't mind the playtime. I played the whole game with mods, and if you launch it with mod organizer, Steam does not count your presence in the game.

I remember the first time I played the demo from a disk sold with the magazine. To this day, this was one of the most terrifying experiences that I've ever had in games.

Many-many years later, thanks to Mandalore's review, I finally decided to play through the whole game.

Slapped some quality of life mods on it and prepared to probably abandon the game after a couple of hours (as I usually do with games that are THIS old). But, to my surprise, it was actually a really fun experience.

You know, not long ago I finished Arx Fatalis and I've felt that I really want to play something similar. With the same levels of player agency and immersion. Thankfully, SS2 is that kind of game.

That being said, it has its flaws. One of the main problems is that I had to use the walkthrough guides several times to find this or that and progress in the story. But all games of that generation have those kinds of moments.

Don't know about you, but I sure do need more immersive sims like that! Too bad it's a niche genre.

This game is a true fruit of passion. Most of the work was made by two brothers - André and Johan Steen. I must say, that their efforts and dedication transformed into a beautiful and endearing game.

I also want to note the music by Callum Bowen. Without it, the experience would be incomplete.

If you want to take a small trip into a story that is full of vivid colors, calming music and relaxing gameplay - try Voyage.

It's nice.

I actually wanted not to leave a negative review for this game, especially since I've received this game for free as a birthday present (thanks again, by the way!).

It's unoptimised as hell.

I liked the story (although it's not that good closer to the middle of the game), I liked the city that developers created (seriously, it looks good), but damn. Constant FPS drops even on the lowest settings, without the launcher e.t.c. It also sometimes just crashes without an error.

But the thing that made me leave the negative review is the fact that even the videos of this game record with lags. I've recorded 10+ videos to make a compilation, but all of them were ruined because of the damn crackling sound atop of all of the videos.

Basically, I've just thrown a day out in the window.

Other than that, it's a decent experience, although I think that Mafia 2 was way better. (The original Mafia does not count, bc it's a game from another era and it's its own thing.)

P.S. Shooting and (in some ways) driving in this game are not good.

So, yeah.

I can tell that the original game is great, but this port doesn't work properly on modern PCs (specifically the correct registration of the input, which is basically the main part of the game). Don't bother to buy it.

Is it a chef-d'oeuvre? No. Is it worth playing it? Absolutely.

Hm, where to start.

First of all, I played and finished this game from the release till the end of 2020, in case you'll be reading it in the future. So yeah, there are a lot of bugs of various complexity, most of them can be cured with reloading the game. If you are the person who can be easily bothered by the lack of polish, then don't buy the game yet. Wait till most of them will be fixed.

Now with that out of the way, I can say my thoughts on the game.

When I've bought the game, I've decided in advance, that I won't expect anything as magical and superb from it, as some people did. I lowered my expectations, so to speak. Plus, I guess it's worth mentioning that at this year I've missed most of the big titles, mostly was playing games from my backlog, so I was kind of underexposed, if you can say so, to newest stuff on the market.

My first hours in Night City were pretty mediocre in terms of gameplay. But despite this and the immersion breaking bugs, I felt captivated by the visuals alone. Spent close to 18 hours in the first zone (prologue, so to speak) mostly doing generic activities and running around the hood.

The game truly opens itself only after the first part (when the whole territory finally opens to you). I've found myself gawking at the surroundings, at people, at their clothes and cars. I've experimented with different weapons until I've found the ones that I liked.

While the combat part is far from being the most interesting in this game (AI is FAR from being the brightest), there are still fun parts to it, like slicing and dicing your enemies with katana. Seriously, katana FTW.

What are the strongest parts of this game then? Story, characters, visuals and sound.

The main story and the side missions (not the Gigs) are pretty well written (with a few exceptions). Some characters are not that good, but most of them are pretty interesting, with unique personalities and feel to them. I'd say that the most flat character of the game is V themselves, which is kinda sad.

And that is where my guess of "why's that?" is touching one of the main issues with writing. At certain places it feels like literal chunks of content were cut out.

But anyway, the story and the characters are still pretty damn good.

The visuals are my soft spot in games and this game delivered it well. I won't dig deep into it here, so you can see it on your own, but I'll just say that the art direction is top notch, imo. I've also catched original Bladerunner's vibes a few times and that worths a lot.

Anyway, I would like to say that this game is at the edge of past- and next-gen. It's not really a next gen, for me, but rather something monumental that kind of generalizes things and tech from the past gen. At least it looks like that, when you look at it as a consumer. Don't know what's under the hood, so I might be really wrong. My point is mostly about game mechanics and some weird game design solutions.

Other than that, despite its problematic launch and REALLY questionable decisions made by (insert whoever decided that lying about PS4 and Xbox performance is a good idea), it's still a good game that has no analogues on the market, at least at the moment. (Deus Ex is a different game, I would not compare them, maybe only the setting and some augs unite them and that'a basically all, imo.)

So, yeah. Go, play it. Mind the "jank" though. Hopefully, they'll fix the most annoying bugs in the near future.

P.S. Forgot to add what I hated the most. The UI. Half of it is too small to read and it's all in red and bright blue. That's one way to get an eye-strain.

P.S.S. Some think that Keanu did a cringey job. Personally I think that he did a great job. I went from completely hating on his character to liking the awkward rocker grandpa. At some moments though, it feels like parts of writing that was made for him and the other characters were cut out. But I've already mentioned that above.

P.S.S.S. I wish they expanded story more on the Black Wall part and rogue AI. Sounds damn interesting. Maybe we'll get more of that in the next game, if it will ever exist. Who knows.

I mean, do you really need yet another recommendation to play one of the best games in this genre?/10