Recent reviews by Notabene

The Talos Principle II is the direct continuation of the first chapters as it pick ups both the narrative and the puzzles initiated. But very quickly something feels a bit more shallow and contrived than the mysteries and grand schemes present in the first one and that's the probably with going from tackling biggest overarching themes of not just humanity but the cosmos, to a more profane, speculative philosophy using some arbitrary mythical entities to tell a story of that is not even has not a fraction of the scale of the first one.

And very quickly the rest of the game feels as shallow, from the occasional, slow exchanges with other bots that don't seen to construct any particular stories to the unsatisfying bits of linear story spread in sections as you complete the game when the first one was much more organically constructed, to the way the world is designed in an almost seemingly generative way without the chaos, variation and easter eggs of the first one.

Overall this is still a welcomed sequel of the game, with expanded puzzle mechanic and overall progression remaining interesting the challenge, but the incentive to progress forward in terms of narrative fall short both through the mechanics and the story itself.

This game had the most potential of all recently released Blizzard games. But because a few years back Blizzard merged with Activision you could tell the governance had changed and soon enough, it became obviously impossible for OW to be developed into the vision Jeff Kaplan had. Soon there was a content drought, the design of the skins became more and more generic and mediocre and the initials talents all left. In order to renew interests in the game, they planed an expansion falsely advertised as a sequel as if they had learned nothing from other games.

They lie again and again, first by announcing that this game will be F2P and come with a PvE that had a skill tree and items and would co-exist alongside OW1. They lied and OW1 was ended for OW2, which released without PvE which would come later. They completely changed the relatively fair grinding system with lootboxes that were as problematic as they were fun and optional for a Token and Battlepass system which even if you pay for will have you grinding for scraps while it became impossible to collect and unlock anything without paying (and is still the case even with legacy credits that barely allows to even get a Legendary skin in a season) making the game absolutely useless without incentives for lots of players.

Then they lied again by cancelling the PvE, instead releasing a paid Archive mission for the price of the whole OW1 game while removing the skills tree and items. This game deserves the overwhelmingly negative review as should all the subsequent update, until this once promising game forcefully and repeatedly destroyed by Blizzard died while only a few thousands of the degens who are a very low minority remain.

I was willing to like it, I mean it's rare we get games with interesting art direction. But this game is actually a very mixed bags of eurojank, terrible and even off-putting writing and overall just bad game structure and design.

From the beginning you can tell that the game doesn't have anywhere near the finess, the maturity and the class of Bioshock: all NPCs female models have the same face, there are 3 NPCs with neurodevice exactly the same, audio lines are messy and super-imposed, set-dressing and decoration is really inegal, and will the city in the beginning is a nice sight which makes you realize there's no FOV slider whatsoever, you start realizing how terrible writing is really terrible and unfortunately is everything I dislike about modern Russian culture: outdated bad tasted couch potato bros. The fridge scene could've been fun but instead they weren't with a very tasteless lines, and that's where I actually starting disliking the game and seeing for what it is: a badly designed, redundant, janky, unsophisticated mess in one of the most promising, interesting world building since Bioshock, but nowhere near and I mean miles below the latter.

In fact passed the intro, the game started to bore me and feel repetitive very quickly, so I don't recommend buying the game and instead waiting for it to be really cheap to play the first tencile of the game after which point it falls to all it's shortcoming and dialogues continue to become annoying.

Great indie narrative experience

Tempering with a product bought by users should be illegal. Let's put 2K on the blacklist like Deep Silver and a few other...

Full review to come

Great and immersive art direction and an original mechanic of perspective, changes and shadows. Could've used hints sometimes but otherwise was a laid back puzzle adventure/platformer experience with a very cool universe.

No game has reach a design, cinematographic, art direction as forward as Death Stranding. The gameplay and system itself is typical Kojima with a caveat: you have to brace yourself not to fall at every-steap

Don't believe the un-hype.

Swords of Dittos has two simple premises: an enjoyable roguelite game and a beautiful "Adult-Swim-ish" universe and art-style.

Granted it has few (even though major depending on the platform) glitches which are bound to be fixed, lots of people seem to either not understand the concept of roguelites, not know how to use a controller (granted options are a little miscalculated), or simply fail to see that this is somewhat of a work-in-progress game with lots of potential.

While little details like the inactive bouncing items, redundant text, scrambled city stores or slow menus are true, these are easy to fix and not, you know...the actual content of the game.

Which is what is very well-made like any other roguelite: the more you play the more you understand how to play, the more you discover details in front of yours eyes from the beginning, the more you understand the stakes and the hidden meta underlaying the game to progress.

And in that, while lots of elements are already in place, and many could be added or activated in the future, the experience itself in a world that for once doesn't look like another crap pixel rpgmaker or an ugly unity half-assed game, but an artfully crafted roguelite experience to be enjoyed alone or with friends. And about that, my only regret is that the game only accounts for the coop aspect of it, but not so much the competition aspects as everything is shared and undifferentiated in "score".

EDIT: While the experience seem to be enhanced by Mormo's Curse, lots of basic annoying issues still have not been fixed like controller support or aspect ratio

The limited angles of head-motion is disappointing otherwise this is impressive, but since it's volumetric 3D video and not real-time, this could have been a bit more detailed or realistic. The fake Komatsu ad is one of the best VR experiences I tried, it's now in my top VR showcase list.