Recent reviews by Or1on

"Behind The Frame'' is a story of two lives. Two human beings so near yet so far away...a love born from coincidence, immortalised in memory and in art forever.

During my first play-through I was initially confused: it started as a cosy art story, then it started hinting at a tragedy and the ending was somehow haunting at first. When the story resolves itself everything becomes clear and the only things I could feel were love, sorrow and gratitude.

I think I should stop talking about the story now though, the game is really short but intense and any more writing could give away the feelings that the game wants to transmit at the end of the player's journey. Let's move to the technical aspect instead.

Graphics are gorgeous, the game is an interactive anime with a great direction and such a great art style that for a moment I forgot I was playing entirely. Every character is well designed, places feel true and genuine and the choice of colours, camera angles and "acting" is simply spot on. This is one of the games which proves that art doesn't need realism to feel authentic and give an experience to its consumers.

Music is simple, original, outstanding and really broke some tears in the end. I am a musical person, I play instruments and I always love exploring games music and even buy the soundtrack when I feel it; this game gave me excitement, worry, sadness, loss, healing, memories, happiness...all thanks to its music. It truly is a work of art, I would love to buy the vinyl as soon as I can, but at the moment it is only available from iam8bit-US, so it is a bit pricey to get plus the risk it gets damaged during shipping, I just hope some stock in Europe will be available again because it is that worth it.

In conclusion, I opened my mind, ears and heart for two hours and I came back with a sad smile on my face, grateful to have experienced someone's love, someone's loss and someone's craft. I will always cherish this experience and it might be that is because I'm getting older but these little gems are really starting to leave a trace that I thought it was only possible with music and reading but I never thought it was possible to feel like that after a game. I just wanna say thank you to the devs, you just made my Christmas 2023 more special. <3

It's a short, soothing game about the journey of a lifetime and how sometimes there is literally no place like home. The person we become, the people we meet, the people we lose...it's all part of our journey and we will always bring all of this with us in form of memories, photos, plushies, gadgets, etc.

The art style is simple, yet so distinctive. The music is beautiful and makes unpacking a relaxing experience rather than a stressing chore. Everything about this game is worth the price of the ticket and at the end of the few hours it takes to finish it and unlock all the remaining achievements you will be left with a smile and your mind will try to walk through your memories.

I am really grateful that this game was developed; experiences like this can help us move through tough times, give space for reflection and give a well earned break from the stress of adulthood.

A+

It's a nice and cosy game about fixing things. Some controls are a bit strange and could've been designed maybe differently, but I really loved the style and originality of the title. What I would like in a sequel would be full 21:9 support and maybe controls customisation for things like using the screwdriver :)

P.s. I love the soundtrack, sometimes art really lies in the small things! <3

It's Hot Wheels: Unleashed all over again! Great handling, highly detailed cars, crazy tracks, unlimited customization via the track builder: what's not to love? Oh well...maybe the story in the campaign mode is a bit cheesy and nonsensical: I mean, kids are not stupid, the developer could've come with something more meaningful or even with nothing at all, the game is great and fine anyway and everyone can love it just for what it is: fun arcade racing.

The addition of dashes and jumps make the multiplayer really spicy! This game is 100% reccomended, just ignore the comic strips in the single player campaign XD

I recommend Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Overall it's a good Spider-Man game: it has action, good character building, nice graphics and a gameplay built over the strong points of past superhero games.

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That said I have some serious complaints about it, and the most frustrating come to play after generating a New Game+ file save. I will follow with a pointed list of what's going wrong:

- Frame rate is a lot less stable: I have the same PC, same drivers, same version of Windows but inexplicably the game jumps all over the place between 124 FPS and 93 FPS causing various stutters despite G-Sync. I think that the main reason are some dips in the line of the 60s which happen for enough ms to cause bad frame pacing. Fortunately it is relatively rare and only happened with the New Game+ save, never occurred during my first playthrough.
- Frame cap is strange: this game has no proper frame cap, you just set a Hz target and enable V-sync. I find it quite dumb because it increases latency and doesn't let users with G-Sync squeeze just the right amount of stable frames that their computer can produce...a solution to that (and the previous issue as well) is to set a frame cap for the game from the drivers.
- The cinematic videos crash after about half an hour of gameplay in New Game+...this never happened during the first playthrough, NEVER. So it's really feeling strange to me that this is happening. I filed a bug report, maybe it has to do with my config or there's a rare bug that Nixxes needs to figure out.

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Moving aside from the technical issues, the game is solid. As I said in my initial statement it has a good combat system which takes the best out of other superhero games like the Batman Arkham series and previous Spider-Man games as well (does someone remember Ultimate Spider-Man on Win/Xbox?). Fluid and well crafted animations make the game a joy to play, it's easy to find your timing for combos and you can really enjoy watching it as much as playing it: its satisfying.

There's a really good selection of difficulties and accessibility settings for all type of players: whether you're there just for the story or you want to be a completionist who loves a good challenge, this game as it all. I really loved the balance in difficulty and I think there's a great work behind that. Yeah, enemies are not all that variegated but they have specific powers/abilities and Miles has something like 40 skills and 4 gadgets plus the mods to the suits. There's a lot, so balancing everything surely was not easy.

So, weird crashes apart, what's not to love in this game? Well, actually there's a strange feeling that I didn't love and it;s the feeling of the DLC. This game has a full game price, has a good combat system, a good story, tons of skills but still it is too short.
I would have preferred a little less collectables (which are well made and enrich the lore by the way) and a couple of missions more. After a great start with amazing cinematic scenes and great character building the game just falls off. The whole epilogue of the story is off in three missions, almost leaving no space on processing what's going on to the player (and for the poor Miles a lot happens at the end of the game). This doesn't make the game a bad game, but for people who do not care about collecting all achievements and doing all the contour activities this kinda ruins the game. Miles Morales could have lasted 10 hours, just for the main quest, and it would've been the best Spider-Man game ever (even more than Spider-Man Remastered because of the freshness of the main character and finally being in Harlem rather than in Queens) but instead it's a 5.5 hours main quest and you lose quite a lot of the game if you're not in for the side activities and the collectibles. They really add the extra 5/7 hours to the game and a lot to the story of Miles, so you should really play the game in its entirety.

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Going to the conclusions: Miles Morales is a good game. It is a no-brainer for Spider-Man fans and a good action man for the rest of us. It packs story, music, colour, action and lightness. I would've liked to see it being priced for 10 quid less, but on Steam you can get it even for a higher discount, if you're patient enough. This is a game that is worth being played, you can feel the passion of the developers who crafted it and you can feel the quality behind the production. Depending on how much you value Spider-Man and length of games just buy it, either full price or with a higher discount. It gives 26 hours of fun overall.

P.s. I have played it with the DualSense but I don't find haptic feedback nor adaptive triggers really being a game changer in how you perceive the game. If you don't have a Sony DS controller do not worry, you are not losing any of the crafts of this title.

EDIT: Just finished the game in New Game+, it just hard crashed as soon as I used fast travel to an activity location looking for the last achievement to hunt. I expected better, honesty.

EDIT: So...it's Christmas time, one year after my initial review and I really have to say that Insomniac surprised me: crashes on Nvidia cards were fixed, Dual Sense feedback is improved and the whole game just feels a lot more polished. Also, I bought myself a RX 7900XTX as Christmas present and I am glad to see AMD hardware being well used as well. I play with FSR at Quality, 3440x1440 and everything (including RT) at max using 6 ray probes for reflections: the game smashes over 100FPS with no stutter or crashes and it just feels like a polished experience. Kudos to Nixxxes to not giving up on this one, many devs just abandon old titles they instead took whatever they learned from porting Ratchet & Clank and applied it to their previous Spider-Man ports giving a more polished and complete experience to their users. That's lovely to see and experience!

'Last Day of June' is a great short game and a lovely adventure. The team behind this game really put down great storytelling and the most amazing thing is that this achievement was reached without a single line of dialogue!

The art style is simple but effective, I really love how the apparently empty faces of the characters were not an obstacle for the understanding of their feelings. Expressiveness has been reached through a combo of great mimic and good sound design.

Speaking of sound, the soundtrack has been composed by Steven Wilson and it's lovely from the first moment up until the game's finale. It is a gem, and I immediately ordered the LP as soon as I finished my first run of the game.

Technically the game is fine, there are no prominent bugs but during the panning of the camera you can notice minor flickering of the assets. It's not bad but could've been better. From a requirements perspective, it's not a heavy at all and even old computers can run this game easily. The only real issue with this game is that you don't have save slots: once the game is finished, if you missed an achievement, you'll need to start again from scratch and your old save data will be cancelled.

If I should give this game a score between 1 and 10 my verdict would be a 7.4
It's a great game but it is really too short and technically I would expect it to be more refined, considering how short it is. Achievements are easy to grab at first play-through, so there isn't really much replay value.

Despite the shortcomings it is still a recommended game, artistically valid and with a great soundtrack!

Battlefront II is a proper Star Wars Game. The environment, the models, the weapons, the lore: everything breathes of a galaxy far far away...

The main issue with this game is the weight of the reckless and avid decisions made by EA and the devs originally for this game: the progression system is flawed, the loot boxes are now useless but for some reason still in the game, there are credits but I still struggle to find any usefulness in them and the achievements (or milestones as they're called on Origin) are still broken.

Honestly if instead of pointing on the loot box system EA would've put his bet on a longer campaign (5hrs for the main campaign and 2hrs for the DLC campaign on maximum difficulty is really short) and a proper progression system today it would be one of the most played games out there and a lot of people wouldn't have waited the price tag of 20 quid to try it.
I understand that Battlefront is like Battlefield (aka multiplayer first) but Star Wars gives a lot of space for good stories for treating this game like a mere pay-to-win multiplayer bonanza.

At the actual price I feel to recommend this game anyway: the campaign has a good story and creates connection between the original trilogy and the new trilogy, graphically it's superb and the sections on the fighters (you'll play both on a TIE Fighter and on a X-Wing multiple times during the campaign) are really worthy the ticket price. The scale of the multiplayer maps is also incredibly well done and it's a lot of fun to play. The only problem is that to enjoy this you're going to have to forget that this game was progression based...everything unlocks straight away and the only thing you need to do is levelling just to access to power-ups, but still does do not present any prestige or challenge base system as hardcore multiplayer gamers would expect.

So, Battlefront II is a game with tons of defects: if you are a Star Wars fan just buy it, if you are just looking for a compelling multiplayer game don't buy it unless you are curious about the setting. Sound and graphics are a technical marvel but I don't feel safe in saying that it's ok for everyone because EA really spoiled a multiplayer experience this time.

I will update this review further, for the moment being just give it a chance, if it's not for you refund will always be an option!

I played lots of ours of No Man's Sky when it firstly launched on PlayStation 4, it was one of the first games I bought again on PC as soon as I had a new PC capable of affording it and it's amazing how refreshing the game is after all of the updates and the support that Hello Games gave throughout the years.

The additions so far are:
- custom ships
- buildings
- underwater world
- new species
- new tessellation system
- fixes to the procedural engine that now give us the worlds promised during E3
- more lore (YES)
- new terrain modelling tools
- new ships
- 4 player coop
- spaceships fights
- VR

I can't wait to buy the Valve Index just to get lost in this game. I stopped playing it again in "traditional" 2D because it looks like it is the perfect game for a complete VR experience and the announcement of HL: Alyx completely sold me on the purchase of an Index. I will update the review with more gameplay details as soon as I'll go through it in VR.

So far it has been a really cool and sometimes mystic experience. Thank you Hello Games.

We want achievements and trading cards!

Said that I can confirm that the idea is relaxing and actually funny! I did the computer technician as job for about 14 years and it is really fun to me to read some crazy emails and order/change parts bringing on the business.

The controls over the computer parts are not so realistic but the managing accent that the developer gave to this game is relaxing and fun to kill spare time.

It would be cool for me to contribute in any way possible to the final realization of this game. So, if the developer is reading: contact me!

I hope to see if finished really soon, in the meantime I am really enjoing the job! :D

It totally worths £15! :D

Entertaining, fun and not easy at all! This is a great puzzle game for all the ages!