Recent reviews by Spectrum™

I would like to start by saying that I only got Cyberpunk as of patch 1.31, not because I didn’t think it wasn’t worth before, but because I didn’t have the rig to run it properly. And I believe that was the main problem with Cyberpunk 2077 when it first released. It’s a very ambitious and demanding game, that clearly needed more time to be polished around the edges. Of course, it doesn’t help when actionists make pressure to release the product sooner. It also doesn’t help when people still insist on making these games for consoles, it gets worse when the devs are forced to optimize it to old gens. Understand this: PlayStation is the reason why the industry doesn’t evolve faster. Cyberpunk was idealized for PC. Why? Because it’s beautifully complex and demanding. Why would you downgrade your product when you know you can make it outstanding? That was the idea behind Cyberpunk 2077, to make an outstanding game with outstanding designs and graphics. Unfortunately, it was also it’s downfall – there was no time to polish the edges, because the time was cut short on optimizing it for the prehistorical machines, we call consoles. Nevertheless, Cyberpunk 2077 it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played on the top five with The Witcher 3, Death Stranding, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Control.

You guys remember Legion? It was a Marvel TV show about the son of Charles Xavier, AKA Professor X. The dude inherited his father's extremely powerful psychic abilities but also had a mental disorder, you can guess the rest, the show was incredibly psychedelic. As of this moment I can’t find a better way to describe this game, amazing [crazy] story, beautiful graphics and top of the game mechanics, 100% recommended.

"Satisfactory isn't the type of game you'd expect to be as amazing as it is, let alone be a complete time sink, but alas, here we are." - Grifflicious, 2021

I don't think I've ever changed my opinion about a game so much. I've played Outriders since day one, I've been here from the inventory wipe on the demo, to the inventory wipe on the final version. I've seen all its ups and downs, and I've always changed my opinion accordingly. One thing never changed though - I think the game looks and feels amazing, love the gore and brutality of it, the same way I find the story captivating, even if rushed sometimes. I'll also maintain my opinion that this game has a lot of potential, could be one of the best, but there's a lot of edges to polish. Now that almost a month passed by since the launch of Worldslayer, I think it's the best moment to take some things out of my chest.
First of all, even though I really enjoyed the story expansion of Worldslayer and the endgame of Tarya Gartar, I think it was way too short. The campaign felt too short, not sure if everyone felt the same, but I know that, both for me and my fireteam, it was done in less than two hours, probably because it was also really easy, but I'll get into that in a moment. I was one of those that preorder the expansion in the first hour of it being available on Steam and I remember I paid way less than my teammates did, not sure exactly how much, something between 20-25€, I'm also not sure if it was a bug or if it was on purpose, and I still feel like I paid too much money for so little content.
Like I said before countless times, the game is too easy. I get that they’re trying to please everyone, and I remember how much crying there was about the difficulty of the base game, but to be honest, I already found the original content too easy. Yes, Yagak was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sponge, but the game was never design for solo play anyway, and yet, it was doable in solo. I also get that a lot of people don't have looter shooter experience, and making builds may be overwhelming, but that's why you have a WT/AT system is it not? And let's be realistic here, Ereshkigal looked like Swiss cheese. I think that rather than making enemies weaker you should be focused on making characters more versatile and balanced, but that's yet another point of my dissertation.
Now Tarya Gartar is what I think the biggest problem with this expansion. I remember when I first saw the broadcast and the trailer, the promised of a dungeon was the sole reason for why me and my colleagues decided to preorder this expansion. Being a Destiny veteran clan, we were craving an activity like this. Imagine our disappointment when we realized that what we got was just more expeditions with some kind of small exponential difficulty, with zero playability, it's always the same thing. Yes, I know that we can now kind of target our loot, but let's be honest, the game has a ridiculous number of mods and status effects, the combinations are endless, what would be fine if the characters were versatile, but they're not, so farming for specific loot is still a pain in the ass.
Then there's the question of whether it's worth to keep grinding Tarya Gartar - it's not. The amount of work you put into your builds is at once destroyed by how unrewarding the system is. I made the math, it takes about 2-3 runs of the dungeon (doing all chambers available and repeating 1 until you're out of attempts) to go up 1 Apocalypse Tier, while it takes about 3-4 runs of rewards to be able to upgrade 1 piece of gear. Which means that if I completed 10 runs of Tarya Gartar, I'll level up about 5 Apocalypse Tiers, and yet I'm only able to upgrade 1 piece of gear. Sure, the game is easy enough and it's possible to finish runs with gear 10 levels below the AT but at certain point is just ridiculous. It's not directly proportional. So, you're better off doing expeditions again because at least you get far more materials to upgrade your builds. But even then, the currency system is so poorly design that you're still going to be broke every time. You can always be shady like our beloved content creators. The EAC is not there anymore so who cares right? (I'm being sarcastic)
Balance, mechanics and encounters complexity. I feel like this section deserves some love, I have no notion of how the community feels about this, but in my opinion, one of the reasons why people feel bored and frustrated is because of how little thought appears to be put into the mechanics of the game. I get that this is an attempt at making the game more solo friendly, but when an encounter has no boss mechanics is not a boss at all, is just a buffy enemy. As I see it a boss should be complex, when they are just sponges with ridiculous, never ending spam attacks, I'm looking at you Arbiters, is just boring and infuriating.
Then you have mods. Usually, when there's a large library of mods, it results in more diversity in terms of builds, the same thing goes for weapons. If you have a vast collection of said things but most of them are useless, then you're just ruining the loot pool. I would rather have less stuff and more diversity of builds. Also, I feel like PCF don't have actual gamers in their team, either that or the ones they do, don't have a lot of experience with looter shooters, I've tested the builds the devs put out, and I'm sorry, but they're really bad. Even when they're showcased in videos, I'm confident the difficulty is lowered, because that stuff really doesn't work.
That's it, I think I've touched the most important points of the game. Of course, there's always the little things, like, why can't we still lock gear? Why is the inventory so small? Why can't I save builds? (Seriously, even Payday2 has that) Couldn't we get more crafting options? I don’t know, but I feel like this is just nitpicking now. In short, the game looks amazing and feels great, but the mechanics are completely off. I now the devs don't want a live service game, but a never-ending story needs to be live service. If it is supposed to end, then it shouldn't take this long to achieve AT40.

Demonstration of what happens when developers forget games are supposed to be fun.

OK, so here is what I think. The new graphics are great but the game still full of bugs, the sounds are weird, some times they crash and makes a annoying sound. The animals crash a lot, like you are running trying to catch them and they stop, then you start killing them and they reappear 100 meters ahead. I know the game is a alpha version yet so this things should be one of the things to improve. I'm not saying it's a bad game, actually, it is a awesome game, but it still have a lot of bugs to correct. Good things? The new menu of building and hand-made is very better then the last one, the life, hunger, etc strips were in my opinion a great idea. The map is HUGE!! Keep the good work and the game will be one of the best games of survival. If you keep correcting bugs and keep improving the game it will be one of the few that will make front to the old MINECRAFT!