Recent reviews by Quandale Dingle

Solid yet short horror game. I didn't find it overly scary but it did have some solid little scares. Pretty atmospheric and the ending is really good. Only complaint would be the platforming is quite jank as the movement feels very sluggish and hard to control accurately.

As cool as this game was at first, I cannot recommend it in its current state. The first 20 hours I was just in awe, the procedural generation, the atmosphere, solving damn murders in a sandbox game where I had to just figure it out on my own?? It was amazing.

Unfortunately though this novelty wore off pretty quick. After about 10 hours you start to realise some things just don’t add up. A lot of the emails talking about someone stalking them etc don’t actually lead anywhere. What you essentially have is a fingerprint hunting simulator which 90% of the time boils down to checking the victims phone book and workplace for a matching print. There’s some exceptions like the sniper cases but that’s the only new content we’ve seen in over a year with no signs of major updates in future. The game is essentially abandoned.

Overall a game with a lot of potential that won’t ever be capitalised on. With more content this game could’ve been something amazing. As it stands if you can grab it on sale it’ll definitely entertain for a few hours but don’t expect anything more.

Project Zomboid has to be one of the most rewarding zombie survival experiences I’ve played. It’s brutal, unforgiving, tedious and anxiety inducing at times. You will die a lot. You will also do a lot of mundane stuff like building walls around your compound, fishing, foraging, farming etc, which may sound boring but it just adds to the immersion and the tense moments are all the more exciting because of it.

The game also has a vibrant modding scene adding everything from new weapons and guns to entirely new maps and game mechanics.

The devs can be the most frustrating part of the experience as the game suffers from feature creep and idk if the game will release in my lifetime at this point. Don’t let that discourage you though, the game in its current state is absolutely worth playing and is in a better place than a lot of modern full releases.

I loved CS, I spent hundreds of hours playing and dollars buying all the content, but this sequel is barely in a playable state. I can forgive the bugs and lack of assets, but after months of basically no meaningful changes and added features I just cannot recommend this game to anyone. There is still no mod support (arguably the life blood of the original CS), no real challenge to the game, some features are broken (the entire economy system) and at this price tag this is unacceptable. I've played more feature complete early access games. Maybe check back in a couple of years but this is one of the few games I truly regret purchasing.

There's plenty I could go on about regarding DCS. It's a money sink, a time sink, the performance can absolutely suck, the devs can make some infuriating decisions, stuff just doesn't work like it should sometimes, you get the idea. The moment I get into VR and hop into the cockpit however, I forget about all that. It's probably the most immersive, rewarding experience I've had gaming. If you're willing to spend the cash on the modules and peripherals and you want to fly some jets and blow ♥♥♥♥ up, you will NOT be disappointed here.

Just finished this game after binging it over a few sessions and I gotta say - it exceeded my expectations. I'm not gonna lie, a game based on a marvel IP had me very sceptical at first, but I'm glad I was proven wrong.

The game is very cinematic, lots of cutscenes, dialogue, action scenes - typical marvel stuff and it's honestly great to look at. The characters are extremely well written - they're funny, dialogue is natural and the character development is amazing, you feel like you're actually part of the guardians of the galaxy. The story is also great. Good plot twists, plenty of interesting characters show up throughout and it always kept me engaged.

So what is the actual gameplay like? Well, it's linear, formulaic and simplistic but still remains modern and fresh in its own right. No open worlds, adventuring, exploring, solving puzzles, defeating waves of enemies and occasional bosses, this game plays like old story driven games of the past - but in 2021, combined with the amazing characters and dialogue and the fun combat, this is seriously refreshing in a sense. Speaking of the combat, its simply great. It's simple enough that it's not overwhelming but has deeper elements (like elemental abilities and commanding your team) that it actually feels tactical and strategic as opposed to a bland third person shooter. I guess it's sort of got RTS elements to the combat and it's honestly refreshingly fun for a game of it's kind.

All in all, one of my favourite games this whole year. About 18-20 hours of really solid fun, fully worth the price tag.

So here goes, i bought this game at release off Frontier's website before i transferred it to steam, and I will admit the first 50-100 hours of gameplay for me were excellent, so much to see and do. Don't get me wrong, this game is beautiful and most of all MASSIVE, a 1:1 scale representation of our own Milky Way galaxy, and you can explore every square inch of it.

The problems only start to arise when you try and get into the content. For one, there's no real story or narrative, only an overarching story that you need to scour forums etc to find out whats going on. And second of all, this game is a grind. Simple as that. The mid-late game is just a ridiculous grind for credits and mats for engineering if you own the horizons DLC, just to buy bigger and badder ships and just go back to the exact same grinding for your new ships. There's no purpose to what you do in this game. It's essentially a ship upgrading simulator.
Sure there's multiple 'professions' like trading, bounty hunting, being a mercenary, piracy, exploration, smuggling and even being a space taxi however they all have the depth of a 1 inch pool. Trading just involves using websites to give you viable trade routes, and then you just fly between stations buying and selling. Bounty hunting just involves going to resource sites and nailing pirates and criminals and claiming their bounties, over and over again. You get the idea, most professions just involve the same repetetive actions over and over again, all just to get more credits to get better ship modules and better ships. Theres no weight to what you do, no impact on any narrative, and most of all these professions dont have any depth or complexion to them. Theres a "background simulation" but all that involves is moving different progress bars up or down when you "influence" factions, and that might lead to different economies in that system or even war, and sure thats cool but once again there is no weight, a system goes into war and you're like "okay" and go about doing whatever you were doing, it makes literally zero difference to gameplay in the end.

So, lets say you ignore all this and you want to roleplay, perhaps as a loyal servant to the empire devoted to fulfilling the emporers wishes, and you want to join a powerplay faction. Goodluck. This requires the worst grind in the game, working your way up in a faction you pledge allegience to, your "merits" (essentially XP for the faction), will HALVE each week. This means you need to countlessly grind for hours upon hours each week just to stay at a high standing with your faction.

There's WAY more i could go on about, and even more grind i could talk about in this game, but i'll finish with this; if you want a euro truck simulator but in space, or you just want to ♥♥♥♥ around, then maybe grab this game on a sale and go for gold, it wont dissapoint for the first 50 hours of gameplay at least. However, if you want to roleplay and get into the later game and get the big ships and take advantage of all the games content, prepare to a grind akin to having a second job at home. It's honestly worse than F2P games.

This has to be by far a perfect example of what an early access title can bloom into: a fully fleshed complete experience, where I never felt like I was being cheated in any way. This game has regular updates which shows the support of the developers, and just helps give you something new to do every time you open the game. I utterly love this game and the fact that i can go from building interplanetary colony ships to a jet powered boat that can break the sound barrier. The mod support is also an amazing part of the game, and will also ensure the longevity of this amazing title.
So a tl;dr for those of you who are lazy :P

Pros:
- Sandbox environment where you can explore an entire solar system
- Fully simulated physics, in atmosphere and in vacuum
- Amazing modular rocket/plane building
- Constant support from dev team
- Extreme amount of content for price
- Modding support
- Amazing community
- KERBALS!

Cons:
- Runs in 32 bit causing instability issues, especially when running mods

So all in all i honestly rate this game 9.5/10

I couldn't recommend staying away from this game enough. If you purchased it a few months ago or even two years ago as I did, you would have had a blast with it, because at its core it's an extremely fun game with a great soundtrack. This new addition of microtransactions has completely and utterly destroyed the game. For a while now people have been complaining that the publisher were getting greedy with the absurd amount of DLC, however until now it was viable to play the game in its stock form. Now however, you actually need to buy these microtransactions JUST TO GET STATS. Do not purchase this game, under any circumstances, even if you're rich, teach these scam artists a lesson.

Great game, really good replayability just cant wait for multiplayer :).