Recent reviews by Moe

Fun writing and gameplay! If you enjoy word puzzles, this is for you. The visual style is also slick, and it even works well on ultra-wide screens

Very nice continuation of the first one!

Puzzles felt easier than in TP1 (especially considering the star-puzzles @_@), still there are some head scratchers, and very varied mechanics. The struggles of the robot community felt natural, and I really liked a couple of characters. The megastructures look awesome and make it worthwhile to explore the hub levels for hidden extras

But I do have some negative points:
- The philosophical topics of TP1 seemed deeper and more iteresting to me. Especially towards the end, the different options for resolving the disputes appeared like pretty obvious "good ending" vs "bad ending" choices.
- There are noticable lighting bugs (bad reflections, noisy bounced lights) that distract from the beautiful sceneries

wandafull

It's not a bad game, but the main character is so unlikable that I lost interest in playing the game. The voice acting was also often unfitting.

Other than that it's a straight forward zombie game with interesting bike mechanis.

This is probably one of the best single-player shooters available right now! The movement is slick, gunplay is superb, and the graphics/animations are gorgeous! Oh and the Music! Perfect!

There's lots of stuff to discover and plenty of demons to kill!

I don't have things that I hate about the game. But there are nuisances:
- sometimes it's harder to figure out the way you need to go than finding hidden extras
- you can find "1ups" that guarantee instant revive instead of going back to the last checkpoint. That's a neat mechanic. I just wished the game would ask me if I want to use them before I get resurrected. Cuz it's easy to clumsily stumble into a new room and get killed pretty much instanly. In those moments the 1ups feel horribly wasted.

But that's all I have to complain about. Don't let that distract you! Doom Eternal is a perfect continuation of the last Doom!

First, for people who know absolutely nothing about guitar, the game will be a cruel mistress. But if you can play an E-chord, you should be good to go.

Rocksmith helped me alooot with learning songs and maintaining a steady practice routine! The mini-games (Guitarcade) are brilliant and make practicing much more enjoyable! And because you need to look at the screen, the game trains you to not stare at your guitar neck all the time.

Why Guitarcade is so great? Because you get points. And what’s so good about that? When learning an instrument, you’re also developing your ear. So the “judge” of your goals (“this is how I want to sound”) is constantly getting more and more critical. It feels as if you’re not making any progress, but in reality, your standards have changed. But Guitarcade scores shows you you’re getting better, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Riff Repeater for learning songs is also neat. I only wish, sections could be selected more finely. So sometimes you might have to go through “uninteresting” sections when working on a specific lick. The ability to scroll through the chart when pausing alleviates this a bit though.

As for playing actual songs, it’s great to have a preset effect-chain which fits the original. So your sound will be close to the original guitarist.

There are also a lot of custom DLCs, provided by the community, and I appreciate that Ubisoft is not taking action against that (not patching out the ability to add custom stuff, not sending lawyers after the community).

There are some negative points, but they should be seen as minor annoyances:
- Startup time is ridiculous:
- Riff-Repeater sections sometimes too wide
- Tuning prompt is not great (the indicator visible in the quick options (esc) is much more helpful) and becomes annoying when switching to songs with different tunings.
- Keyboard layout is weird

It's hard writing a review that showes why I love it so much, but doesn't contain spoilers. The philosophical aspects are a joy to dive into and the writing is brilliant. It's funny, quirky, surprising, and interesting. The puzzles are tough, especially when you try to get all the stars. I also liked the approach they took with the endings. Superb! And the moment you internalize that this game was made by the Serious Sam devs... :D

The only thing that really annoyed me was the movement: where you can and can't go is not intuitive. Sometimes you can perform pretty long/high jumps and land solidly, but ONLY when you see the footstep-higlighting. Otherwise you're often confronted with unexpectedly slippery surfaces and invisible walls. The game seems to be cognitive split in that regard. While it encourages you to think outside the box and experiment around, it's extremely strict about where you're supposed to jump.

But trickjumping is not the core of the game, so you might as well ignore me complaining about it.

Highly recommended!

This is a really good game. Very atmospheric, very good dialogues, great sound design and very nice graphics (especially for an Indie game). The circumstances of the main character and her growth throughout the story are a clear focus and very well done. I also liked that other characters in the game are displayed with a video overlay, that kept me guessing in the beginning, if this is video or in-game graphics. This also adds a nice distinction between you and all the other humans you encounter.

I also liked the 20 minute making-of that's contained in the game! Really puncuates the concepts they had in the game and helps understand the design philosophy more.

There are some negative/annoying aspects:
- combat lacks variety. The moves are well animated, and you can do a bunch (even some combos), but especially during the longer fights it becomes pretty repetitive
- puzzles are monotonous. Pattern matching is what you'll do mainly. But at least you'll get enough hints to prevent frustating guessing games. When you watch the Featurette, those puzzles make a lot of sense. But I wished the devs would've come up with some more different types.

So if you're looking for a viking-fighting/puzzle game, look elsewhere. If you're in for a dark, compelling and atmospheric journy, get it!

I think there are enough reviews, so I keep it short:

Definitely one of the best fantasy games out there. The story is heartfelt, with many relatable, deep characters and great dialogues. There are not as many big game influencing choices as promoted, but you can probably still save your favorite characters from a grim demise. The graphics are beautiful, with a fabulous sky box, lush landscapes, swampy battlefields, and mountainy peninsulas. Oh and the DLCs! Extremely well done additions to the overall experience, also containing a lot of cool characters and interesting story lines.

This thing is a gem!

P.s.. Bonus points for the attitude of the developers!

TL/DR: The premise got me started and the gameplay kept me pulling through. But overall I'm disappointed. You've seen most of what the game has to offer after 5 to 10 hours. After that it's just more of the same. The story isn’t well fleshed out. You get pseudo complex, self-absorbed villains dramatically spewing hollow phrases. But you never learn why people joined the cult in the first place. The balancing is also quite bad: it’s most difficult at the start and gets continuously easier.

I can only recommend the game for people who like a sandbox environment in which to wander around and shoot stuff without much hassle. That’s basically it.

Here’s the long version:

I think the difficulty influences enemy spawn rates, which are comically high at the beginning. And when you've not conquered any territory, they are popping up everywhere all the time. That messed with the immersion for me, because it feels so much like a shooting gallery that it overshadows the grim theme of the game. Another thing that had the same effect: after the resistance gains airplanes, which can happen early in the game, the whole premise is lost.

Also a big weak spot is how you interact with the main baddies. Your character basically always passes out, and then some guy does some monologue. That’s the only form of storytelling this game knows. And in many moments you lose control over the character and are forced to endure preventable situations.
I think the whole game has two story moments where the player could influence the ending, but in one of them the player is forced on one path! One of the main villains is priming the player into “headshot” mode. In the end, you’re running down a series of halls and the last guy you encounter is not an enemy, but an ally. I guess the game devs thought you’d shoot anybody in the face at that point. I didn’t. But sadly you can’t quit the scene unless you shoot the guy!

I played the game on hard and it felt pretty easy (except for the ridiculously difficult car-chase scene at the intro). I like that you can still kill baddies with a single headshot on hard, but the player tanks too much (and I didn’t even invest in the health perks). It's constantly getting easier. After you’ve gotten the second squad mate you can basically lean back. And on top of that you get the perks to boost weapon damage and stuff. But the game doesn’t throw anything new at you, so… Even when enemy helicopters arrive there's no reason to panic, because they fly sooooo slooooooow. AI is weak in general. It’s just enough to make them walk into the player’s crosshair.

Driving physics are functional and fun, but flying is extremely dumbed down to the point where it becomes boring. By far the simplest controls I’ve witnessed in a game so far. Given that helicopters and airplanes provide the most firepower of all vehicles, there’d have been potential for equaling that out with more complex flight mechanics.

And then there’s this:
The player is using homeopathy to boost strength…?! Do we really need to advertise that ♥♥♥♥? I’d have accepted magic Indian sauce, but that just gave me a blank stare. I think I need to write a mod which adds some realism and shows the actual effect taking that stuff: nothing.