Recent reviews by Battle-Brother Nobilis Opus

UFO 50 is an alternate history game about a society that built Utopia, and the surrounding mystery of how civilization fumbled it so hard. Where did UFO Soft go? Why were these seminal works unreleased, and left to gather dust in a forgotten warehouse? Like John Milton's 17th century epic poem Paradise Lost, UFO 50 is not just a singular work, but an arrangement of multiple masterpieces. This game chronicles a decade of UFO Soft spanning three console generations, starting with the humble Barbuta for the LX-1 to their magnum opus, Cyber Owls on the LX-III. Whether you start with the cautionary tale of Biblical Grimstone, the coming of age story in House Party or the aspirational goal of manifesting mankind's destiny among the stars in Campanella 2, there is something for everyone in this compilation of classics.

It will be the job of future scholars to debate the wisdom hidden between the lines of code within the Miasma Tower, but I for one feel grateful enough to live in the here and now, where UFO 50 exists on my hard drive and no longer just the imagination of a fictional 80's video game company.

Play Forever.

My PC is several years old at this point, but this has got to be the most poorly optimized fighting game port currently on Steam.

It is virtually unplayable for me. Long load times and massive frame drops even just navigating the menus.
MK1 could be a fantastic game, but I will never know it with these performance issues.

For reference, I have the game installed on an SSD, with a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and an RTX 2070 GFX card.

Hopefully I can amend this review with a future patch or the right combination of tweaks in the settings, but as of now, I unfortunately cannot recommend MK1.

In another universe, Splitgate is the most played game on Twitch and has united all the nations of the world under a proxy system of warfare where all conflicts are resolved via Team Teabag Confirmed.

Gameplay is simple: It's competitive Halo with a portal gun. Immediately intuitive, but the skill ceiling is infinite.

There are only a handful of maps but each is fun and enables interesting and creative use of this game's big draw, the portal gun.

The weapons are your standard arena shooter archetypes, but each of them is meaningful to the pickup economy and gunplay feels great.

Modes are a grab bag of Halo throwbacks, including Team Swat and Oddball.

The game is free to play, with a pretty forgettable battle pass option and loot boxes. Nothing is predatory nor particularly interesting, you're just customizing the colors and armor sets of pretty generic looking space marines and their weapon skins but there is a lot there and it is a fun system to create an avatar with.

EDIT: With recent patches, the cosmetic skins have received a huge visual overhaul and are now quite nice.

I really can't recommend Splitgate enough. The only downside is the player population, but the devs are always experimenting with ways of getting people on at the same time with Happy Hours and community events. It's not revolutionary, in the sense that Halo and Portal have both been in the cultural consciousness for a long time, but so had peanut butter and jelly before someone created the greatest sandwich known to man.

The areas where this innovates as a Quake game feels derivative as a hero shooter. It's greatest strengths are where the philosophy has stayed the same, but has been iterated on. The maps are the best they've ever been, weapons feel great and the characters are suitably rad. Hero powers feel like a failed experiment in my opinion, and I would've liked to just see an insane number of skins and other cosmetics instead of the slow churn out of newly designed characters with their own abilities and attributes. It's a noble attempt at reviving the arena shooter that ultimately falls short. That said, the game is alive and well-supported, and there have been bigger turn arounds; looking at you RB6 Siege and FF14: ARR. Time will tell if Quake can shake things up.