Recent reviews by greyfade

It's a fine game, insofar that the gameplay is pretty good, the planets and moons have a lot of stuff to explore, and the story is interesting.

The problem is that the writing is cartoonish. The corporate people are cartoonish mustache-twirling sociopathic villains that'd make Boris Badenov blush with shame, the rich inhabitants of Byzantium are unfeeling one-dimensional psychopaths, workers are barely even robotic, and everyone else is either cartoonishly anti-corporate or braindead. Character writing is so thin it's invisible, with only two exceptions: Parvati and Junlei.

I can see what they were trying to do, and I can appreciate, and do in fact enjoy the story, so long as I'm comfortable remembering that I'm watching an early 2000s cartoon written by and for children. But if you're coming into this remembering the strong writing of Fallout: New Vegas, you're in for nothing but disappointment in this mediocre, childish cartoon.

But at least the art direction matches the writing style, I guess.

I do not feel obliged to acknowledge the quality of the game when Rockstar has so little regard for players that they would actively deny Linux and Steam Deck players access to paid-for content.

The community is the most toxic I've ever encountered anywhere, and the short-lived Linux support is long gone and forgotten. This game is for people who are rotten to the core, and not fun at all.

A wonderfully well-paced way to learn digital logic. I've taken to recommending it to anyone who wants to learn more about how computers work or who have trouble understanding assembly language programming. It would be a fantastic companion to NAND2Tetris and other similar courses and resources.

Its only shortcomings are in how the first few levels are presented. If you don't already understand basic boolean logic, I can see you being a bit stuck at first.

Did anyone at Avalanche even *do* any playtesting for keyboard and mouse? My experience suggests they only bothered to check if it worked, and never checked to see if it was even playable.

Cars and especially motorcycles are completely uncontrollable with WASD and have inexcusably bad latency and drift behavior. Literally every other game has done this better, and this awful DLC just puts increasingly badly designed races in front of you and won't shut up and go away. Just Cause 4 would be better if cars and motorcycles couldn't be driven at all.

Meandering, goal-less, pointless, and atmospheric above all else. This is a game for someone who isn't me. I hesitate to even call it a game. It's not clear how to progress or even what progression means, and the most detailed guides only tell you what content you can expect to see, but not how to actually *see* that content.

That's probably why so many people give such angry negative reviews. I don't see the appeal of this game, and I don't understand why anyone would. But if you do, by all means.

There's a game in here somewhere that someone will enjoy. Not me.

The gameplay is decent, the gunplay is okay, and the story seems interesting, and the game overall is fine. It's not bad, but it's not good, it's fine.

The story doesn't really have a good hook, so I find it hard to get invested. COVID aside, the story feels like it treads old ground that others have done better. I haven't read the book(s), but the game makes me feel like the book is just a bad retread of a book or movie that someone else did better. Not very engaging. The characters that are presented in the cinematics are similarly bland; I can't really feel interested in them, so I don't really care if they live or die. They're set dressing, nothing more, and it cheapens them.

The gameplay is fine. I think if the developers actually spent some time working on the single-player experience, I might enjoy it more, but the game is clearly tailored around a half-assed "online service" concept that tries, and fails, to be a co-op MMO, because it's the store that really matters ... to someone. Not me.

Meh. There's something there to enjoy, I just can't find it. I know it's there, but not anywhere I looked.

Fun little puzzle game that evokes the experience I grep up with playing Congo Bongo on my Commodore-64. This game deserves far more attention than it gets.

And the Linux port runs great!

The game no longer runs without patching, as the Towns website is gone.

Can't log in to Origin, for no apparent reason. So, I guess EA doesn't want me to play a game I spent money on.