Recent reviews by J

I've been playing WuWa since launch day on my actual account. If you took Genshin (or Zelda's) open world mechanics, combined them with the tightness and complexity of ZzZ's gameplay and added challenges with actual difficulty, you get Wuthering Waves.

Really though, I judge gacha games off of how pressured I feel to pay for pulls at any given time to keep up ("keep up" in this case meaning being able to comfortably clear endgame content). Out of the three I play (ZZZ, HSR and WuWa) I don't feel any pressure to pay for pulls in WuWa beyond me actually wanting specific characters. The MC is still a competent free DPS a year into the game's lifespan, which I don't think is something you can say for most popular gacha games.

The only thing more stunning than this game's gameplay and design is its technological limitations. With a 4080 SUPER & a 9800x3d my game struggles to keep a steady 60 with everything on Ultra + HD texture pack. In order to play this game you either need a serious rig or you need to be comfortable playing with the equivalent of lastgent graphical quality to maintain a solid framerate.

Even with the HD texture pack and everything on Ultra, the game's graphical fidelity is very idiosyncratic. The texture/object LOD appears to be fixed to some form of background setting and there's a lot of objects popping in and out, even during cutscenes. Meanwhile, the character models look like they could be in a film. Nice to look at, but you're looking at the world 95% of the time. Strange choice.

Literally everything else about the game is stunning. The additional moves, the QOL changes with the Slinger, the open world design-- everything is great.

Both Dishonored games are perfect titles that should be in the MOMA. I played both titles back to back and I can confidently say that they're without a doubt the best single-player games ever made. Yes, better than Half-Life. Yes, better than Baldur's Gate II. They're better than whatever game you were about to think of next, too.

The only thing that could make these games better is an Iron Man mode that forces you to live with whatever mistakes you make in getting detected, killing people, etc. It's pretty easy to save scum your way to an easy Ghost/Shadow achievement.

This is so sad.

After sitting with it for a while I can't really rec this game. The water system is a trivial, plebe thing to whine about. The game's AI, however, is abysmal, it's laughably easy and for an extraction shooter there's very little risk. I sweat more trying to retrieve samples during extraction in Helldivers, and if I die in this game I don't really care. You don't even lose your super-duper expensive rig when you die, so you can just do a quick run to get whatever you lost back, whether recovering or buying it.

For a game that emphasizes that you're a small widdle boy/girl in a big wide world filled with things that will step on you by accident it has a funny tendency of making you feel like the Doomslayer once you get a decent gun.

Chivalry 2 is the best to ever do it. There isn't a better medieval combat game.

Characters are wildly unbalanced and most of them have very derivative, unexciting gameplay designs. The maps are poorly designed, don't flow well and equally unbalanced.

Gigantic was more or less this exact game but still had way better, much deeper character design and better map/objective design. This game would be much better if it had a lane/nexus system since the characters feel more like SMITE characters than anything else, but the game is clearly trying to grift off of Overwatch's downfall.

This would be a Mixed review game if it weren't for the IP and would have dropped to 5k concurrent by now. Another great example of how titles live and die by their marketing and not the quality of their content.

This game can't even justify an entrance cost, let alone a subscription. Additionally, the developers are deeply crooked, knowingly and actively harboring people that have openly confessed to doxxing players, threats of sexual assault/harassment through in-game voip, all while selling an underbaked and overpromised product.

The co-op desync and microstuttering are both absolutely ridiculous. I'll fix the review when they fix the experience.

Probably the most devastating return to a franchise I've ever seen. Any reviewer that recommended this game should be tried at the Hague. New World on the XBOX360 had a more immersive world than this death rattle of a product.