Recent reviews by Meff

this is the dark souls of trombone gaming

Ooooh Elden Ring

There is a decent framework here I guess, but the game just has way too many problems right now.

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This review was written a few weeks after the 1.0 release. Some information might become obsolete.

This is both a review as well as an introduction to the game. If you're only interested in the review, it might be better to skip to the TL;DR.

Hunt: Showdown's genre is a bit hard to nail down.
Obviously it's a first person shooter, but unlike anything I've played before. On a surface level it also looks like a Battle Royale, having a large-ish open map (1km x 1km) with several small teams (solo, duo, trio with a max player count of 12 per match).
Wait, that sounds wrong, right? 12 players on a square kilometer? How are you gonna find each other, especially when you realize that the play area doesn't shrink like in most other BRs?

That's where the PvE part comes in. While in BRs your objective is to be the last team standing, in Hunt: Showdown you can theoretically win without you - or anybody else for that matter - every killing another player. Instead, the objective of the game focuses on bosses and their "Bounty".

Before I go any further, I should probably talk about the setting of the game.
The game takes place 1895 in Louisiana, US. That means marshes everywhere. I first found this a bit off-putting - marshes aren't my favourite theme in games usually - but it really fits the slow, methodic gameplay of Hunt. Also, there is no modern weaponry. Most of the weapons you'll be using are bolt-action rifles, break-action shotguns and single-action revolvers. Those are slow. You will absolutely learn to make your shots count.
Or you can go for one of the more specialized weapons. Faster lever-action, double-action, pump-action and a few semi-automatic weapons exist in the game, but usually come with drawbacks.
Take the Winfield, which is a fast lever-action rifle with a large internal magazine, but comes at the cost of utilizing a smaller cartridge, giving it less damage, range and penetration power. Or the Dolch, a prototype semi-automatic pistol with a large magazine, decent controllability and insane damage values and penetration power for a pistol. Its drawback? For one it uses special ammunition that is somewhat hard to find on the map, and secondly it costs a lot of money.

Right, that's a thing. You need to buy your equipment with the money you earn during play. And if you die on your mission? Well, I'm afraid your stuff is gone. This really raises the stakes of the matches, you really don't want to die and lose all your hard-earned stuff. Sometimes it can be the best decision to just pull out of the match early if you think you can't take a fight. How exactly leaving the match and keeping your stuff works I'll explain in a bit.

On top of having to buy your equipment, the characters you play are also not immortal. They die, they're gone for good. These characters - Hunters - level up with each mission and can acquire traits that improve certain aspects of your gameplay, like making them perform certain actions quieter or faster, improving handling of certain weapon classes, making them more resistant to certain damage types, and much more. Once they have reached a certain level, you can make a choice: continue using them but risking their lives, or retiring them, bringing a large bonus to your profile level (which is used to unlock more equipment from the store) but making that Hunter inaccessible (you still get all their equipment back).

Okay, cool, now back to the Bounties I mentioned earlier.

The map is segmented into compounds - small building complexes - that have so-called "Clues". Picking up such a Clue greys out a portion of your map, telling you the boss isn't in these areas. After three Clues, only one compound will remain. There you will find one of currently three possible bosses. You kill the boss, you "banish" its corpse (a process that takes a few minutes and alerts all other players where it's happening), then you pick up its Bounty.
Once you have the Bounty you can go to one of three extraction points at the edge of the map. Extracting like this with the Bounty in your possession counts as a win.

This overall sounds rather straightforward, but of course this isn't all there is to know. First off - rather obviously - you have (at most) 11 other players going for the same thing. More often than not, sooner or later there will be a confrontation. On top of that, the bosses aren't the only PvE-elements in the game. Compounds and the space between them are littered with different kinds of infected; from normal grunts to special "marked" enemies. Think of them like Special Infected in Left 4 Dead. So you need to clear these compounds out, at least partially.
Shooting everything in your way with a revolver is ill-advised though. That makes a lot of noise, and noise means that somebody now knows where you are, which is usually bad. And they don't have to be nearby to figure out where you are - every non-silenced gun can be heard across the whole map (excluding the Derringer, which can be heard up to 500m), and the superb sound design makes pin-pointing the direction and distance easily possible. Additionally, the map is littered with "noise-traps", stuff that will make it painfully obvious where you are if you accidentally trigger them. Those include groups of crows and ducks, dying horses on the streets, chicken coops and dog kennels - they all will make a lot of noise if you dare come close to them. On a smaller scale, there is shattered glass or littered tin cans on the ground or chains hanging from the ceiling. Moving through those any other way than crouched will make noise - not enough to hear you in the next compound, but definitely enough to get the attention of anybody in the same compound as you.
Or maybe you want to invite trouble and trigger those on purpose? There's only a maximum of 11 other players; if you take them all out, the server's yours. The match timer is 60 minutes, if by 30 minutes everybody else is dead, that is enough to sweep through all the compounds without fear of being shot, which will net you a large amount of money and experience. Hunt is the epitome of high risk, high reward.

Since we're touching on PvP, how exactly do fights play out? Weapons in Hunt are deadly, but not frustratingly so. A headshot will more often than not kill you instantly, but bullet travel time make those increasingly harder to hit at a distance. Speaking of which, there is no bullet drop, only travel time. A body-shot from a rifle will never kill you unless you've been shot by a Nitro, a big game hunting rifle with crappy sights and basically no ammo. The second-strongest rifle, the single-shot Sparks LRR, will deal exactly 149 damage on an upper torso shot - 1 less damage than your maximum HP. So, being one-shot is usually somewhat rare unless you're unlucky enough to get hit in the head. Or stand right in front of a shotgun - those will still shred through you in one shot if you're close enough.
But the slow nature of most of the weaponry make careful aiming and utilization of cover a must and - in its own way - enhance the intensity of firefights. A ballsy rush with a Romero 77 shotgun to close the gap can work out, but if you blow your load and miss, that leaves a large opening for your opponent to take you down. As I've mentioned, high risk, high reward.

I'm reaching the symbol limit, so let's wrap this up:

TL;DR:

+ suspenseful first person shooter in teams 1-3
+ beautiful graphics
+ interesting mix of genres
+ superb audio design
+ rewards precision and strategy

o punishing gameplay
o hard to learn

- performance issues (usually due to CPU bottleneck)
- off-center crosshair (this is more a personal issue, I've heard some people don't even notice)
- small player numbers at odd hours, resulting less players per match (sometimes even empty matches)

This review contains very minor spoilers of early-game events. Like literally the first five minutes maybe.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a murder mystery game set roughly at 1800 where you play as an insurance investigator. The ship called the Obra Dinn which was missing returns to port with the entirety of the crew and passengers (60 people) either dead or missing, and it is your job to find out the identity of every single person and what happened to them. Sounds a bit dull at first, but you are armed with a - well - magic pocket watch that allows you to see a freeze-frame of the exact moment of death of every person you find, letting you wander around in these freeze-frames. It also provides the last conversation around the victim just before their death. The game has a big theme of telling the story backwards, something akin to the movie Memento if you've seen it (if you haven't, I recommend that one as well).

Also you are in possession of a book that provides additional information, like a complete list of the crew (including their assigned number, their role within the crew and their nationality) and a painting of them all gathered together, though you do not know who is who on that painting at first. Every time you watch a moment of death, the book gets filled with when this death happened in relation to the other ones as well as noting who depicted in the painting was present in the scene. This is important since a lot of times identities have to be deduced from information across multiple death scenes aka Memories.

The story of the game is good. Not breathtaking, but interesting enough. What really raises intrigue is how the story is told through the deaths of the crew, often chaining multiple deaths together (where you access Memories from within Memories), providing a clever way of raising questions and answering them through past events.

I have to confess I somewhat cheated towards the end by consulting the game's wiki (because I went off a wrong early-game assumption that I never revisited - that's my own fault) and I regret doing so. Every fate is solvable, though some are easier than others (the worst probably being telling the identity of the Chinese crewmen apart). Getting it all right by yourself must be really satisfying; I robbed myself of that sadly.

To ensure you neither get horribly stuck on wrong assumptions or bruteforce the game, the fates have to be solved in sets of three. That means that only if you have three correct pairs of identities and fates the game will acknowledge them as correct and permanently mark them in your book. This IS exploitable though: If you have two identity & fate pairs that you are 100% certain about, you can take guesses on the third one. I think this might be part of the design though, giving you a bit of leeway if you just happen to not find crucial information.

Pros:
- Intriguing storytelling of a good - but not amazing - tale.
- Interesting monochrome art style.
- Freeze frames are rich with detail.
- Good voice acting for pre-death conversations.
- The difficulty feels just right most of the time; the game respects your intelligence without being ridiculously convoluted.
- Solving fates is genuinely fun and engaging.

Cons:
- While I personally had no problems with it I've heard the art style can be hard on the eyes after a while.
- Memory navigation can be a chore. There is no direct way to access a memory from the book as far as I can tell; you have to go to the corresponding corpse and get to the Memory from there. Chapter IV is a particularly bad offender: The whole chapter plays in a way where you can only go backwards. If you want to go forwards, you have to exit the Memories and start again from a later one, working your way back to the one you actually want to access. (Luckily this chapter is rather straightforward considering fates though)
- Sometimes - or rather rarely - the timing in the Memories seems a bit off. I remember two instances where people seem to have moved (or have been moved) quicker than should be possible. Overall this is negligible though; it did make me get stuck on one of the fates though.
- The first time you enter a memory you have to wait for a fixed time (until the music is done) before you can enter the victim's cause of death, which sometimes can be quite infuriating. Also when multiple Memories are linked together through in-memory corpses, the game tries to get you to the next Memory immediately through creating a false sense of urgency (the pocket watch shaking in your hand).

Lastly two or three hints I sort of wished I knew when I first played. These contain spoilers:
- This one is rather obvious, but I'm blind: The hammocks on the gun deck are numbered.
- A lot of relationships and professions can be deduced from the painting alone; same nationality people and relatives / close friends / coworkers are usually depicted close to each other, as well as people of same rank usually dressing the same way.
- !! This one might be too much of a hint/spoiler !!: Some corpses are completely missing and their Memories cannot be accessed, implying they either got away and there is no corpse or they died somewhere off the boat. Honestly, don't be afraid to assume they just drowned. You'll likely know who's responsible.

yes

i mean maybe

i mean DON'T

NO

RUN AWAY

Probably my favourite tactical shooter of all time.

I was never really that much into CS:GO, but for a long time I didn't really have anything I'd prefer over it in its genre. I don't even know what exactly made me do it, but about two years ago I gave R6S a try and I've been hooked ever since.

The game comes with so much depth and opportunity for creative playstyles that after roughly 1000h as of now I still feel like I'm learning every match.

The heart of the game lies in its dynamic destruction mechanics which allows you to tear open walls, floors and ceilings in most areas. This mechanic alone is a solution to a problem a lot of tactical shooters face: if there's a strong angle to hold, you will hold it, and it will most likely pay off. But in R6S, if someone is holding such a powerful position, you can just open up new sightlines through walls and floors to drive them out or kill them. Or you take your drone which comes with an integrated camera to find out their exact position and wallbang / prefire them; there's honestly a vast variety of ways to deal with any given situation. The action also switches up a lot between slow methodical and fast execution-based gameplay, going to both extremes.

The game used to suffer from a poor netcode, bad balancing between operators (your "classes/heroes/whatever") and maps and infrequent updates, but I have to say that Ubisoft has since picked up the pace, realized R6S is probably their strongest competitive multiplayer title and focused on reworking unhealthy aspects of the game, which in result steadily improves. The team behind the game has announced that they will stick with this game for the years to come, so its longevity should be secured.