Recent reviews by HaloEliteLegend

Played the original AA Investigations on DS. This is an excellent re-release and it's awesome AA Investigations 2 finally get an official translation! It's an excellent title, if you're a fan of Ace Attorney you can't go wrong.

Very fun mystery with solid characters and a great atmosphere. Love the fourth wall breaks, and the true ending is very satisfying. Did not expect this to be as good as it was for a game I had never heard of before! Definitely worth a play if you're a fan of visual novels, paranormal stories, and light mysteries.

Toughest fighting game I've ever played

Scrolling through people's personal files and constructing narratives about them is as addicting and f'd up as ever. Another solid entry in this series (although, a bit of a step down from the first game imo!). Well worth the price of admission, really gets you thinking about your complicity in a corrupt surveillance state. You want to follow orders and take the easy way and "win", even as you know you're being manipulated. Really good stuff.

AFTER 2.0 UPDATE: At the end of my previous review (posted below), I wrote that even if they fixed the bugs, they couldn't fix the heart of this game without a radical overhaul. They did a radical overhaul. Update 2.0 completely changed how the game feels, and with all the additions, fixes, and new content since, this game is a far better experience than when it launched. Finally, after 3 years, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game. It's an excellent RPG and now well worth playing.


OLD REVIEW BELOW -------------------------------------------------------------------

(Written 1 month after launch)

Disclaimer: My current play time includes about 30 hrs of idling, I've played about 40 hrs at the time of this review.

In it's current state, the game is unfinished and with many technical and performance issues. I cannot recommend it in good conscious for that reason alone.

Which is unfortunate, because this game has hints of brilliance. The character questlines are all so well written, and for how much I've played, the main story has held my interest. Unfortunately, outside of these quests, which make up about 20-30 hrs of content, there's barely anything worth mentioning.

The world feels lifeless and fails to suspend my disbelief, despite fantastic visuals (if your PC can handle it), and much of that comes down to incredibly subpar worldbuilding. This feels like a game with a Cyberpunk aesthetic vs. a Cyberpunk game. Outside of some lore entries ("shards") you can read, this game fails to show you the culture, customs, attitudes, beliefs, activities, interests, likes/dislikes, and ways of life of its inhabitants the way the best in the genre do. The otherwise well-written character questlines focus more on each character vs. the world around them, and do little to remedy this. I left this game with the impression that all anyone does in Night City is go to nightclubs, bang hookers, and die in gang shootouts.

So what about gameplay? I need to say this from the start: this game is hardly an RPG. It has a progression system like an RPG, but lacks any player agency over the personality of the main character, or player choice and consequence that are hallmarks of its genre in the west. I feel deceived from the trailers and pre-release gameplay, which until the bitter end emphasized a world of choice and consequence. Your "lifepath" hardly matters, and nearly every dialogue choice only affects the next few lines. If there is any "consequence," it simply follows from the last option you chose, including the resolution of the main story. In fact, the most complex mission in the game is the prologue mission shown in the E3 2018 gameplay footage... which I have a striking suspicion was simply a vertical slice authored from a hopelessly over-scoped project to wrangle some semblance of a direction for the dev team, rather than an authentic representation of their gameplay to date. The end result is a game that's a far cry from the best RPGs (Witcher 3, Fallout: NV, Dragon Age: Origins, etc.), that somewhat succeeds as an action-adventure game, but does not reach the heights of the best of the action-adventure genre either (The Last of Us, God of War, Final Fantasy VII Remake, etc.).

And that's the unfortunate part. They can fix the bugs, but they can't fix the heart of this game without a radical overhaul. Even after the technical issues are resolved, I can only recommend this as a fun romp to get at a good discount if you have nothing better to play. It's a far cry from The Witcher 3, and a regression for what seems like a very talented but poorly managed studio.

Not bad, but not as good as Stick of Truth.

It's fantastic! Best textures I've seen in a video game, period. It's really that good! The close-up detail is just phenomenal. You don't even need a 1080 to run it. I'm running it just fine on a 980 Ti, only lost maybe 2-4fps. It's your VRAM that's going to matter. This texture pack is going to increase your VRAM usage significantly.

At the end of the day, it's free. Give it a try. 60GBs of pure textures. I ain't complaining.

One of the best and most promising new indie games to come out in recent months! This game is absolutely fantastic! In its current state, it is pre-Alpha and very much a work in progress (hence Early Access), but it's very promising and backed by some fantastic developers! Even in its current state with bugs galore, it's been a blast to play with my friend.

Maybe you should wait until the game is more developed, or even for the final release, but it is and is soon to be a very fantastic game. Highly recommended!

If you've played RPGs growing up, here's a cool little game that'll let you relive all those years of Final Fantasy in one very meta, very satirical way. Highly recommended!

Awesome game! The story is VERY well done, as expected of Telltale Games! Some scenes really feel intense, and there's a lot of emotion behind quite a bit of the story. This game takes place in an alternate DC universe and deviates from Batman's original story in profound ways, but it doesn't matter because the execution is incredible. You will find plenty of references, characters, and elements from the original stories all twisted in a very good way. Overall, very nice storytelling!

My gripes mainly fall to the gameplay, but this is indicative of all Telltale games. I'm not a fan of Quick-Time Events (chains of button prompts), and the action sequences, while a bit interactive and cool, felt very detached, especially after having played the Batman: Arkham series where I actually get to fight myself. Also, there is a lot of "fake choice," where the game tricks you into thinking your actions hold more weight than they actually do. There are about 5 major plot points in each episode which do impact the story, but since the story isn't over yet, we'll have to wait and see how they turn out.

Like with other Telltale games, there is a bar limiting the amount of time you have to decide on a choice. This is very good in prodding the player to think quickly (and sometimes brashly!) like a normal human having a normal conversation would.

The biggest turn-off would be... performance issues! Now, I have a pretty beefy rig so this game was mostly fine, but even with a GTX 980 Ti, there was constant stuttering throughout every episode, and it was incredibly annoying! The graphics aren't even that bombastic, so there's no reason for it to be performing so poorly.

Overall, I like this game very much! Give it a go if you're a Batman fan, you won't be disappointed! Just understand that you're in for a visual novel with not much actual "playing," and there are existing performance issues!