Seneste anmeldelser af Finzy

I'm new to KOF and this is currently one of my favorite fighting games in 2022 although I haven't been going super tryhard on this one. The character roster is great and there's some kind of character for everyone, and that's what drew me to the game (that and the waifus :P). The team building aspect also adds a lot and it just overall plays in a distinct way from other fighters with the movement and even throws being different. There's definitely some learning curve but I don't think it's anything unmanageable. It's probably the easiest KOF to date, and the game does have simple autocombos as an option with light punch spam which helps in getting started.

The game looks pretty great in my opinion and I am a fan of the visual style, it looks way better than the previous game that I looked at. Very sharp and clear and there's even RTX support. Personally I haven't had any issues with the framerate after setting the game to run in Borderless Windowed mode, the game barely makes use of my laptop 3080 RTX and will likely run on (far) weaker machines easily as well.

The netcode seems alright and most of the time I can get good even matches around my skill level. There were a few days around launch time when I had issues getting matches, but lately it's been good and I've almost immediately gotten matches after going to wait in training mode (using settings Similar Rank, lv3+, All regions) - although it still seems to prefer my own region in any case.

There's also an arcade story mode with different endings depending on the team you pick (or you can run it with a custom team if you want). The AI there seemed decent for learning the game and I used it for learning new characters. The story definitely isn't anything special at all, just your run of the mill fighting tournament, but at least there's some character specific cutscenes. Overall, modes wise, not anything to complain about, it's about what you'd expect.

I wasn't a big fan of Serious Sam 4 so I went into this one with low expectations. However, Siberian Mayhem turned out to be a pretty serious game. I'd say I definitely enjoyed it more than the base SS4 and SS3 campaigns, which would for me put it still below TSE.

What makes it good? I'd say the level design is a clear step up from SS4, the levels have more variety in them, and sidequests can take you to sections that feel like a different level. And the SECRETS ARE FINALLY CREATIVE! I'm all about the secrets. If a Sam game doesn't have good secrets it's not funky. There's a good amount of secrets that had a lot of effort put into them this time around, and the "classic" type secrets especially were my favorite. I went out of my way to explore every corner to make sure I found most of the secrets that I could. Last time I bothered to do that was probably with SS2.

The new weapons and enemies are also solid and there's a fair amount of new gadgets and gameplay elements to set it apart from the base SS4. Also the levels definitely look prettier and more detailed than the base SS4 ones to me. There's also surprisingly good sound design, with a lot of ambient sounds all around adding to the mood (another thing that was missing from SS4 as far as I recall). The music is also pretty great, I liked pretty much all the level and battle themes. I could've sworn Sam's one liners were better too, there were a few I liked.

Now the bad things; it's not a very long campaign, despite some of the levels being longer, it feels like halfway the length of SS4. Had the entirety of SS4 been made in this style, I think it would have been pretty good. Makes sense since it's a spinoff campaign made by a smaller team though. The story still follows Serious Sam 4's so a lot of stuff is already familiar from that game, along with the bad stereotypes etc, and it limits the scope of the levels. I played my playthrough on Hard difficulty, and I think there were some interior sections especially in the first levels that would have been quite annoying on Serious, since there isn't much room to dodge stuff and I felt like I had to tank hits sometimes. Otherwise difficulty felt pretty solid and by the end of the game I was all stocked up on unused gadgets.

I think the quality of the campaign went up as it went on and my favorite level was probably Siberiade. There's still some stuff from SS4 that is still bad like completely massive (and empty) terrain areas that can make exploration annoying sometimes, but at least usually there isn't hidden stuff in every forest and you can clearly see if that's the way you're meant to be going in the first place. And you also get vehicles to make it a bit faster. But the vehicles can get stuck on tiny nooks on cliffs or the vegetation sometimes which was also annoying and cost me a couple reloads. The last level was allright but I preferred the ones before it, wasn't the biggest fan of the city sections with AI teammates. 4th level's tank section was actually pretty nice and one of the few vehicle sections that I liked.

Also the last two levels and the final level especially had some weird heating issues on my machine. My fps overall was very good, 70 to 130 on Ultra settings in every level, but on the final level I actually had to limit my fps to 60 only because it was heating up my CPU so hard (up to 95 C while GPU was only 71 C), even on idle sections with no enemies. Another part that had fps drops / high CPU temps was the big fight at the end of the train station section in level 4. So maybe some optimization could be done there, at least on the final level, or then it's just the engine being weird (base SS4 also has way higher CPU temps than other games for me sometimes).

TL;DR
A significant step up from Serious Sam 4, but still limited by the base game with some of the same complaints. Would be nice to see a full length campaign in this style.

Pretty solid PC port for the most part. Well optimized and even a weaker PC should have no trouble running it, partly due to it being a Switch port. For me it runs flawlessly at around 120 fps on 4K max settings (150% resolution). I think they did the best they could with the graphics for the most part, but I wish there was better lighting and character models especially could use some touching up, they look a bit dated. Textures are a bit all over the place, I can see they clearly added HD textures in some areas while others are still Switch quality. And the textures also swap weirdly in-between in the village for instance when looking at the ground. Plus the HUD is the same as on the Switch, which does not look nice at all when playing on a 4K resolution and you can see the 32x pixels for icons.

Gameplay wise it's probably my preferred Monster Hunter so far. Lots of new ways to play the different weapons thanks to the Silkbind skills (although some of the skills are arguably more useful than others) + the wirebugs add a lot of freedom to the movement. Hunts are fast and pretty streamlined but I don't find it a bad thing. There's still definitely a use/need for gathering. Sometimes I do miss the hunt preparations from World but overall it's not a big deal, most of the core stuff is still there. And I do like that playing the game generally takes less time than it would in World.

However I wish there was a way to transfer your Switch save to the PC version or something, I think low rank's gotten too easy at this point. I'm just breezing through the hunts waiting for high rank and I think the game could use a bit higher difficulty overall with how accessible they made it. Also maybe some way to skip the tutorial sections :p

I wasn't a huge racing game fan but Forza 5 has me sold. It's imo a great mix of more arcade chill driving while still having realistic aspects. It looks great and it's just fun to play, there's an open world where you gradually unlock more events and you're never pressured to do thing X asap, you can pretty much play it in any order you like (+ load times for events are pretty fast, you can just drive nonstop around the world map and unlock stuff as you go). The car painter is great and it's basically a weeb's wet dream. Unlocking more cars and stuff is fast, and you don't have to grind long to get the cars you like apart from the more monster class ones. There's a variety of different driving styles for offroad as well. It's also well optimized and my laptop can even handle it at 4K Extreme settings at 60 FPS. Creating your own driver is also pretty fun, especially when you get to call him/her whatever you want, plus the story events add a nice touch imo.

I would recommend staying away from the Xbox game pass version though, because it didn't recognize my PS4 controller and it also had a permanently disappearing mouse cursor, Steam version has been working way better for me. And I would definitely recommend playing this on a controller either way, or even a wheel if you have one.

Pretty good oldschool DnD game. Really reminds me of old Neverwinter Nights / Baldur's Gate etc. games. The character build variety is completely insane thanks to the Pathfinder ruleset, it's like a more extensive custom version of the DnD 3.5 ruleset (I've never played the actual tabletop version, but it seems pretty accurate to it) and I love it. The story has kept me invested as well and I like all the companions so far, dialogue is generally very good. Music is also great with lots of epic battle themes in particular. I've been playing on the "Daring" difficulty setting while leveling companions manually, and it's provided a good challenge for me so far without being too unfair at any point (but you can still definitely very easily get screwed if you don't pay attention). Also it seems like it's gonna be a really long game, I've sunk so many hours into just Chapter 1. Spells are implemented well and there is a good variety of all kinds of utility spells, including pits that suck enemies in rather than just direct damaging ones. Animations are also pretty satisfying and there's physics and gore for critical hits and so on.

The downsides to the game I'd say is the lack of character customization options; player character models are pretty generic and you only have a couple of good face/hairstyle options depending on race. You're better off picking a custom portrait for your character instead (I had to download some modded ones to find a decent one). Also it has random bugs but they've been ironed out somewhat, I haven't found anything game-breaking yet but sometimes there's glitches where you can't tell if you can act in combat or not or corpses randomly standing upright and collapsing when loading savegames (hilarious) and so on. When I've played longer now, I've sometimes noticed characters not being able to act in combat when they clearly should, along with pathing issues (sometimes you can lose turns to just pathing screwing up). Annoying when it happens but not too common usually.

The game's optimization is decent but it draws a lot of power from the CPU. I can run it on 4K max settings at 60+ FPS if I just turn HBAO+ to Medium (it gives a massive FPS boost). I've run to a few areas so far that can make my CPU run very hot, for instance the Market Square and Gray Garrison. (For the record usually this game runs my CPU at 78-80 C which is ok for a gaming laptop, the Market Square for whatever reason pushes it up to 87 C - 91 C - I tried all kinds of stuff including undervolting the CPU but it doesn't help, that area just does something crazy to the CPU). I do think the game shouldn't heat it up that much, no other game on my system manages to do that. Otherwise the game's graphics are quite nice, spell effects especially, and it scales very well up to 4K. I only wish that the mouse cursor was a bit bigger, it seems it doesn't scale with the rest of the UI elements for some reason.

Psychonauts 2 is the best effin platformer I've played in years. Might be slightly biased since I was a huge fan of the original, but damn, I literally can't think of what I'd do different, it's exactly 100% how I would've wanted the sequel to be. If you liked the original game by the name of the Milkman, go buy this game. It's like the years haven't even passed between the two games; the art style, dialog, voice actors, feel of the story & humour, everything is preserved and just gotten better. It's probably the thing that amazes me the most about it cause you see a lot of sequels for old games remaking a lot of stuff and sometimes not even feeling like the same game anymore, but Psychonauts 2 immediately feels like a follow-up. And to me, it's still the most creative game series I've played and if somebody asked me if games were art, I'd say yes and show them this game.

They've also added lots of witty new things (i.e enemy types) and gameplay mechanics that add depth. Movement feels a lot snappier and responsive now and there's more ways to travel the levels + solve puzzles. Personally I don't know if I'm even midway through the game at the point of writing, but it feels like it has quite a bit of stuff to do regardless - to me it feels bigger than the original game but we'll see how it holds up. There's more hub areas to explore than just the campgrounds in the original and generally areas feel bigger plus the game gives you some choice in progression sometimes. The game also looks great on Unreal Engine 4, and even though I have a beefy PC/laptop with a 3080 RTX, I can run it at 1440p at max settings and it generally even runs at close to 144 fps at all times so it feels well optimized.

May edit the review a bit after finishing, but so far I'll give it a huuge recommend, easily the biggest platformer release for me since Crash Bandicoot 4 and I'd say this gives it a run for its money. You don't necessarily have to play the original to understand the plot, but it'll definitely help to understand some of the references. Even at this point I've encountered some mental worlds that easily rival the best from the original game for me.

EDIT: And now that I've finally finished the game, I still think it's pretty great overall. I'd critique that towards the end, there's more linear mental worlds and sometimes the game takes more of a story focused approach. While there's still some open ended worlds for sure, I think the first game had more in that style. Also I think the difficulty could have been more challenging in some places, but that's more of a nitpick as I did miss quite a lot of stuff on my first playthrough.

My review based on 1 week of playing New Genesis up to lv13 at the moment of writing (and never having played PSO2 before):

It's a sci fi MMO with very action based combat, more third person shooter than traditional MMO, meaning you'll need to dodge/block actively in combat in addition to your character build and so forth. Monsters have weak points you can target for more damage or to inflict stuns on them. Combat animations look really freaking cool and it's just fun to play, I personally went with Gunner that uses twin machine pistols for pew pewing and Hunter as a subclass so that I can switch to a (massive laser powered) sword when I feel like it.

The character creator in this game is some of the best there is. There is a ton of freedom to create any kind of waifu you want. You want an android robot lady you got that. You want a space elf? Something with horns? You got that. All the body parts and shapes are customizable. However clothing and body armor is somewhat limited which I'll get to in a bit. There's also two body types and it can be a little confusing since the customizations are split to New Genesis and old base PSO2 models.

The soundtrack is also really good. I had high expectations since I listened to the PSO2 ost beforehand but the area and combat themes are very chill and fit the mood of the game well. The areas also look gorgeous and very open ended. There are no loading times once you are in the game which is great (except for small ones when transitioning to duties/cutscenes). Overall, I really like the aesthetics of the game world.

BUUUT, the game is far from perfect. Whether or not you'll like it will likely depend on if you like the style of combat/world etc enough to keep playing it. Here's some complaints I personally have;

- The UI is very dated and could look and function way better. Hard to find the stuff you want, need to figure out its functions on your own. In text chat I still don't know other ways to switch chats other than clicking on small arrows. It also doesn't look very good, the fonts and buttons are super blurry and should really be upscaled. Same goes for the main menu video, it looks very low res.

- The game's launcher isn't very good. I had no idea what "virtual fullscreen" mode was, but it basically enables borderless fullscreen. Also you can only change graphics settings once ingame.

- New outfits and customizations are largely tied to gacha-based(!) ARK tickets. You get 1 free draw per day but the rest has to be paid with either ingame currency or another currency that you pay money for. And it's all RNG what you get. Personally not a fan. You can buy some customizations from the player market at least, but it'll cost a lot. I couldn't even recolor the CAST parts on my character without a Color Change Pass. Which is tied to RNG gacha rewards....

- Player market is locked behind a premium paywall. At least for selling items (EDIT - it seems you can buy player items as a F2P player, but not sell items).

- The game is somewhat barebones at the moment and there is a lot of grinding to progress story. I like the combat so I don't mind it much so far, but you'll definitely have to be prepared for some repetition. At least there is a lot of area exploration to do. And the level cap is only 20 so you may want to level multiple classes or characters, depending on how fast you are at progressing (at least personally, it looks like it'll take me a couple of weeks to reach the level cap).

BUUUT wait, there's more!
This game is two games in one. If you don't happen to like New Genesis, you can play the old Phantasy Star Online 2 with the new engine. I haven't started on that yet, but it has its own, completely separate story from New Genesis. And you can switch between the games freely anytime you want.

So overall, do I recommend it? Definitely check it out if you think you'd like an MMO in a sci fi setting with gorgeous waifus and visuals. But it has its flaws. For me, the flaws aren't enough to distract me from the experience, but I would hope the game gets improved significantly over time. At least at the moment the game's combat works smooth, there was lag at release, but it has been taken care of and I've had a great time since.

I can't recommend this game no matter how good the story might be because the port quality on this is UNACCEPTABLY BAD. For a triple AAA company this port is basically the worst PC port you could possibly make.

- Fullscreen doesn't work properly; have to play borderless windowed. Going fullscreen breaks window placement on my second monitor every time for some reason
- Frame rate cap doesn't properly work. Game randomly caps at 48 FPS or 60 FPS depending on how it feels like
- EVERY TIME I want to use my controller, the mouse cursor pops up IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN and the mouse cursor will not disappear EVER!, you have to keep dragging the mouse cursor off the screen! And I want to actually play this with my controller!
- Load/Save screens will tell you not to "turn off your console". Really, you couldn't change one string for the PC version?
- I don't think the game feels that "upgraded" graphically or UI wise. UI still looks (and functions) straight out of a PS3 game. Anti-aliasing looks very limited cause I still see jagged edges everywhere. Textures vary from alright to still PS3 quality.
- Using the Steam overlay while in-game will still relay inputs to the game like it wasn't paused, so if you type in chat or browse something you'll be activating menus.
- When using fullscreen mode, sometimes the game wouldn't even activate fullscreen properly and it rendered it in a window that was split between 2 monitors and off-screen

These really should get patched ASAP. Nier Automata got a patch 4 years after release, you'd think that they would have learned something from that, it's ridiculous that they charge full AAA price for such a bad port.

For what it's worth though, gameplay wise this plays very similar to Nier: Automata, and the story is definitely interesting. But I can't defend such a sloppy port.

EDIT: And yeah, it is a shame since I'm enjoying it otherwise so far. Very solid story & characters, great soundtrack. If this stuff gets patched I might change my review, but I have doubts since it took them ages to get Automata patched.

I think this is a well done sequel, can be played as a standalone game while it still ties in with the original nicely. Definitely gives Amnesia vibes later on. The build up to horror takes a while, but later on there's definitely some enemy encounters that require thinking and you know it's an Amnesia game when you are out of tinderboxes and lamp oil, nearly dead from sanity loss hugging the only lights you got. But like I said it doesn't do that instantly so don't expect it to be a custom story where you'll instantly be scared.

That aside, I think the new desert environments are interesting and the game definitely tries some new stuff from time to time. It's much more story heavy than the original game and the protagonist says a lot of stuff. Whether or not you like that depends on you, I didn't mind it too much but I did think there was a lot of reading at the start of the game. May be a turn off for some but I liked reading about the backstory to everything and especially about events related to the original game. The main character could maybe be a bit more silent sometimes but overall I don't think it's really a problem; at first I didn't like her that much but later on her character grew on me a bit (though how she manages to do everything with her condition is a bit funny).

Sound design is also top notch, just like in the original game, definitely got me spooked more than the random jumpscares. The areas progressively get more and more "unwelcome" feeling and the game looks good, very pretty dark dungeons indeed. I think the puzzles have been alright and there's only one that took me a bit more time where I didn't notice a certain lever.

Looking forward to seeing how it ends, I haven't finished it yet but I'm probably midway (EDIT - Finished, but doesn't really change my views on it as a whole). My complaints would be that it'd be nice to have more alternative light sources than just tinderboxes and the lantern, and the lantern burns out fuel super fast. Sometimes I also wasted lantern oil by filling it when it was already full, because I'm used to double clicking the oil. Also only being able to carry 10 matches is a bit weird. The game could pick up the pace a bit faster and challenge the player more, but once it started doing that, I enjoyed it more. I'd say it's probably in between SOMA and the original Amnesia in terms of the horror. Definitely a far more horror based game than Machine for Pigs at any rate.

EDIT: Played some more now and I do wish it had a bit more enemy variety in places, also I think it goes from one puzzle section to the next a bit too often, story could be a bit more condensed. Still it's been pretty immersive for me but doesn't quite reach the same levels of the original after you get used to it - it's leaning more towards being like SOMA with a heavy story focus. It was nice to get different endings depending on your choices.

Would be nice if they released mod support, I believe the game could be way scarier with some custom stories. As a whole though, I enjoyed what it had, but it wasn't on quite the same levels as the original game. Comes close in a few areas while other times you're just following the story. Imo the start of the game up till midway was the best, as you know less about what's going on.

Alright, bit overdue for me to review the game; here goes. I can't straight off the bat say if I'd especially RECOMMEND this as a Serious Sam title. It does a fair amount of things well and a fair amount of things badly, in my opinion. Once again I wish I could give a "neutral" review on Steam, but for the series' sake I'll pass this as recommended (with FLAWS!). I'll try to avoid major spoilers where possible.

Let's start off with the good things. SS4 adds new things to the formula of Serious Sam, skill trees and additional firing modes as the main big additions. Both are pretty similar to what you'd find in Doom. But they do add welcome variety to the gameplay and especially dual wielding and mix matching weapons is a lot of fun - and also reminds me of playing InSamnity 2 way back in Serious Sam 2 days. Also all the weapons generally feel pretty good and pack more satisfying effects than in SS3.

There's also gadgets to be found in the levels. The gadgets were a nice idea to spice up the gameplay some more by acting as "powerups", but I found some of them, like the black hole and the mini-nuke, to be way too similar to each other and they just work as Serious Bombs that kill all enemies like a killall cheat. I was hoping for them to be more common with a reduced effect that you could use multiple times. The rage-serum, confusion gas and time warp are good however.

The level design in the game I thought to be pretty good up to the midway point, which is like the Colisseum fight. I feel like the devs generally spent more time refining the early parts of the game rather than the latter. From midway point onwards the levels get repeatedly more boring with huge empty areas and repeating side missions. There's also (in my opinion) some odd design choices like adding a swimmable river with an invisible wall pushing you back when it looks like you can swim to the other shore, and you can bait all the enemies into the water in any level with water to stop their AI from working. There's also a plethora of other exploitable cliffs and other places in the game where it's all too easy to get the enemies stuck in one spot. Also, completely empty pathways and mazes are super common in the game, you often find "dead ends" in the levels that look like a secret but aren't, and while I was playing, many of them also let you get easily out-of-bounds from the levels (and in worst cases break the entire map).

There is a level that experiments with large open spaces (the first France one) but it feels more like a tech demo than anything, it doesn't really add that much to the gameplay and there's nothing but some random encounters to find in the wilderness (that were patched in afterward - there was previously nothing). Vehicles are a pretty cool addition to the game and to their credit most of them work fine and I didn't really have problems with how they control, plus shooting while driving is nice.

The last level of the game was a quite big letdown, I don't understand the music choice for it plus for the most part it's just big huge empty canyons filled with ammo and again - exploitable enemy locations. The new "legion" system in the game was pretty neat but it's only used in ONE spot total, again it feels like a tech demo more than anything, neat but doesn't add much to the gameplay. Plus the scene in the game literally makes no sense whatsoever, thousands of human soldiers charging thousands of mental's hordes like medieval knights...except modern military would never do that.

Also the game's secrets are a BIG step down and most of them lack any kind of creativity whatsoever, I can say that roughly half of all the secrets in the game are LIFE gadgets hidden in some corner plus many of them are parkour secrets on top of that. I don't get how the devs are such a big fan of adding parkour secrets to the game, they feel so off when you're literally supposed to balance yourself on sliding glitchy collision surfaces which makes you feel more like you're breaking the game than platforming. There's very few secrets that have any kind of idea behind them or which makes you feel like more than 5 mins was spent thinking of them.

Difficulty, playing on Serious, was for the most part fine I feel, but I had big trouble clearing the mech section in the Rome levels until I figured out I was supposed to literally hang back as far as I could from the boss. Also gadgets are pretty much a must-have for some fights the first time around - plus some skills are definitely more useful than others, looking at dual-wielding for instance which I think is a necessity.

I generally liked the new enemies added, no problems there. Hooligans were my favorite addition in that they aren't "annoying" enemies, but still represent a threat plus they have clear weak spots in the head. Weak spots are another nice addition and it adds a bit more thinking to the gameplay. It was also nice to see that there were far fewer hitscan enemies usually.

The "humour" in the game is really hit and miss. Some okay conversations, mostly the ones where they don't try so hard, but I think they went out of their way to make the MOST stereotypical representations of different culture NPCs ever possible. It's not as bad as SS3's I think, but I definitely had some cringe moments playing the game regardless. As always, Sam remains the best character though and you can't really hate his one-liners...most of the time.

The story....well I'd say it's nothing surprising or groundbreaking, makes more sense early on in the story but I think they dropped the ball later on with some stuff that happens. I don't think kidnapping scenes really work in Sam and I don't think Sam would be the one to go down without a fight or weapons either. Didn't really enjoy the ending of the game. The audio tapes were mostly boring to listen to, they all repeated the same "doom and gloom, our past life is gone" kind of stuff and sometimes I thought they didn't fit in with the tone of the rest of the game. There's plenty of cutscenes this time around for every level, and it's neat that they took the time to implement them, but I don't think it's their strong point either, most people's faces in the game look really dead and the effect is exaggerated when zooming in close on them in cutscenes. It gives off a feel of "small studio trying to go for an AAA feel", and the animations aren't that great.

It's also baffling that 16 player co-op isn't an option. There's clearly already mods for it and the game engine supposedly can handle it so might as well enable it, the way I see it. Also the game doesn't come with versus content or any additional gameplay modes outside standard co-op. The way they're patching the game makes me think it would have been better off as an Early Access title almost.

Third-person animations are generally bad, weapons will float off your hand, Sam with knives looks more like Sam with forks running for a meal, yada yada. And some of them are straight out broken, it feels like animations were an afterthought once again, even though you can play in third-person. That's a shame because I like using third person to see around me better, if it's an usable option in the game I think the animations shouldn't really be that bad.

The editor and eventual workshop support will probably be the saving grace for the game like it was with past Sam games. As a Sam title, I'd say it's slightly better than Serious Sam 3, but the level design since then hasn't gotten much better and repeats many of the same problems (boring secrets; empty areas). Second Encounter still remains the best Sam title just because of it's vastly superior level design - even if it doesn't have the gameplay variety, it simply has superior design and more memorable levels. Would recommend IF you like Serious Sam; game gets a 7 out of 10 from me. Also I really hope the next title won't be set on Earth once again and that we'll actually get somewhere with the plot.