Recent reviews by Overlard

West of Loathing is a game that needs no twenty paragraph long review.

The basic premise of the game is that you're going out West to find your fortunes, help people, or just get off your boring farm and do something fun for once.

Gameplay:

Combat is simplified turn-based. You have a number of "Action Points" that let you do special actions on your turn and they refresh between battles, and once you're out during combat you can either snort some smelling salts or just do basic attacks. It's so easy that you could probably expect a ten year old to grasp it within a minute or so.

There are 3 classes in the game you can be and they all get their own style of fighting. They're your standard archetypes of fighter, mage, and thief. You can also have a "pardner" NPC that helps you out in combat whom can also level up with you. They all fight in their own way as well, so you have some incentive beyond just reading their unique dialog to pick a new one each playthrough.

If you're looking for hardest game ever, look elsewhere. The combat here is easily cheesed once you find the first "grinding" zone near the starter town, which lets you attack a group of enemies forever to grind out XP to level up. Plus, combat items don't end your turn if they're used, so you could stock up on poisons and dynamite to obliterate every enemy in your way.

For people who want a harder game, there is a hard mode that can be unlocked in the prologue. You can also intentionally forgo having a pardner join you in the game if you enjoy having harder combat and less funny dialog.

Levelling up is done either by auto-levelling (Don't do this) or by point buying via accumulated XP. There are several skills you can level up, some of which are unique to which class you pick. Further skills can be picked up in-game by reading skill magazines that you will lose every single time after reading them just once. But fear not: You can easily acquire every skill in the game and still have a few skill books left over.

Story:

The story is simple, like much of the game. You're out West, you're trying to get to Frisco, and there's baddies and obstacles in the way. However, the main quest is not all there is to do. There's a lot of sidequests to do, each with their own little story to tell, and this is where the game REALLY shines.

The writing is absolutely fantastic. Unless you have no sense of humor, I guarantee that the game will make you laugh quite a few times, and merely sensibly chuckle some other times. Your potential pardners all have unique dialog and their own personal stake in one of several sidequests in the main game. Everything in the game is designed to give you a good laugh and enjoy yourself, so it's wise to go into this game not taking anything too seriously.

Once you reach the end of the game (This takes about 8 hours if you're insistent on doing every single thing possible in the most timely manner, it can be much shorter if you beeline through the main quest) you're allowed to continue adventuring and completing sidequests. However, there ARE multiple endings, of a sort! Depending on which sidequests you complete and how you complete them, the ending cutscene will change! Don't expect some big world shattering difference to occur that rocks you to your core, but at least know that the game will acknowledge that you did indeed bother to fulfill sidequests and change your ending for it.

Overall:

If you like funnyman writing filled with sarcasm and snark and aren't looking for a game that intends to really "challenge" you outside of hard mode, this game is for you. There's plenty of locations to visit and sidequests to do, certainly enough to kill an afternoon or two. You can also get some replay value out of the game via achievements (There is no way to get every single one in one or two playthroughs), hard mode, classes, and selecting a new pardner.

If you end up enjoying the game, I'd also recommend you pay a visit to the Kingdom of Loathing itself. Unlike this game, it does not cost money to play but it still delivers on the humor.

It's like Amnesia: TDD except if it was 200% less scary, involved less puzzles, had less monsters, had no sanity mechanic, and was overall worse save for a slightly better story. If you desperately crave something vaguely akin to Amnesia...

Get the Penumbra collection instead. You'll get spooked more often even though you can actually fight back in the first game.

LISA is a story about a guy on a mission to save a kid, and basically the whole time someone kicks you in the crotch. The game has oddball/dark humor and you probably shouldn't go into this hoping for a cheerful time. Still, the game is really fun! You can collect a number of different party members who have different moves and abilities to help you fight through the game, and while your choices don't HEAVILY influence the story, they still have notable, gameplay affecting impact.

The game has two modes, normal and painful. Painful is incredibly painful, so start on normal mode unless you really want a hard as hell challenge. Overall, the initial playthrough can be quite difficult, but subsequent ones will be much easier once you understand what to do. The beginning can be somewhat difficult and confusing for new players, but I'd still recommend it for anyone looking for a good RPG to add to their library.

UPDATE: I've updated this from recommened to not recommended. The devs clearly don't know how to balance anything nor how to get patches out in a reasonable amount of time.

Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where 4 survivors attempt to escape the killer. The survivors have to repair 5 generators and then open one of several exit gates before they can leave, or if all but 1 survivor are dead, escape through a hidden hatch in the nick of time. The killer has the job of finding people and placing them on meathooks, in order to sacrifice them to his entity. There are currently 4 killers and 5 survivors. The survivors have different unique perks, ranging from self healing to destroying meathooks, which are what the killers use to kill people.

The Wraith can cloak (Albeit with a loud signalling of their bell) and decloak (with their bell again) in order to surprise survivors. The Trapper sets up beartraps around the map, which can catch unwary survivors and make them easy pickings. The Hillbilly gets a chainsaw straight out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which can instantly knock down a survivor if he manages to land his charge, meaning, no, he can't always instantly take you down. The Nurse has a teleportation ability which lets her jump past obstacles that survivors place in her way, but if she misses her teleport then she gets stunned and almost blinded, assuming she doesn't use her remaining two very short range blinks to correct her mistake.

There's a "levelling up" and "ranking" system in play, both separate. Levelling up involves collecting XP (Bloodpoints) during matches from naturally doing what your role entails (escaping/killing) and doing it well. You then spend your bloodpoints on the bloodweb, where different perks(Equippable, permanent buffs that have several ranks), offerings (one time use, randomly activating powerups), and add-ons (Things that improve your tools as a survivor, or improve your special ability as a killer) are available for purchase. Note that add-ons will always disappear if used as a killer, but if you use one as a survivor and don't die OR expend your items "charges," then the add-on should stay with you. The ranking system grades you on a scale of 20 to 1, 20 being the lowest. If you do very well as a survivor or killer, and rack up a lot of bloodpoints in matches, you will gradually climb ranks towards 1. It seems to influence matchmaking, but don't be surprised if you're a rank 20 something and the game feels like throwing you against rank 1's. Because matchmaking is hard.


The gameplay can be considered "tense" when you first start playing as a survivor. You don't know where the killer could come from, only that he's looking for you. You don't know where your friends are, you just know you need to fix these generators and leave ASAP. This goes out the window entirely when you level/rank high enough, then the game becomes stupidly easy and you can abuse your broken perks to handily evade the killer for 3 minutes while your friends fix every generator.

Playing killer is like playing a time attack game. You're constantly under pressure to kill survivors and you can't stop for a second. If you hesitate, the generators are already fixed and the survivors are teabagging you at the exit gate and then complaining about how laggy you were. For some reason the survivors dominate the flow of the game. If you play killer, expects lots of frustrating matches against high ranking VOIP teams determined to make your life completely unfun.

The game is definitely survivor sided and the devs refuse to admit this while regularly nerfing killers. Don't get this game to play killer. Or, if you do, get 4 friends, play regular gameplay for a while to unlock levels and items, and then only ever play Kill Your Friends mode with them so everyone can actually have fun.


The game looks fine. I'm not much of a graphics person. It ran on my six year old laptop, if that says anything. Sound design is very important, so it really is a good idea to play with a headset plugged in. The killer FOV is always extremely limited (Unless you find a certain perk for the Wraith) so that killers are forced into tunnel vision, survivors get a third person camera to use. Apparently the game runs in Unreal 4, and this game looks pretty bad if that's the case.


You can rebind some keys now, which is better than what it was at the start.

There is now a party up system, which has understandably frustrated a lot of killers since people abuse this system to VOIP with their friends, guaranteeing very easy games for survivors.

The game can also be frustrating as a survivor should your teammates prove useless, as with all team games. At least in this game you don't HAVE to rely on them all the time, but they're your only ray of hope should the killer catch you and place you on his meathook.

A gigantic con is the insane grind of this game. You will spend hours working to level up your characters, and you have no choice but to focus on one character to level up. Playing low level killer against high level survivor is a nightmare where the survivors bully the killer. A survivor without any perks can still win, but it's just not the cakewalk it could be. Survivors are massively overpowered (Don't let the survivor mains hear that though) and have game breaking perks letting them remove hooks AKA the only way they can die, run faster than the killer (The cooldown COOLS DOWN WHILE THEY'RE STILL RUNNING) and heal themselves in the occasional event the killer catches up to them. There are loops the survivors can run in the game where the killer literally cannot catch them. A dev with functioning brain cells could fix this in a map editor in 5 minutes. These devs took 3 months to unveil a "fix" that does absolutely nothing.

The only major pro is that if you manage to get a high levelled survivor you can mercilessly bully all the killers in your path and enjoy the devs pandering to you with every new patch and stream.

Except all future support aside from bugfixes that create more bugs to cost money. Enjoy paying for this early access game.


The game devs clearly favor the survivors. In their latest patch (In fairness, a public "beta" to test the upcoming patch) they debuted a slew of killer nerfs while leaving all the unfair survivor tactics in the game. Their proposed infinite loop fix does nothing at all. Playing killer past rank 10 becomes a chore and is unfun. Avoid this game at all costs and go buy The Last Year or Friday the 13th instead.

I've played almost every Fallout game, save for the unholy mess that was Brotherhood of Steel. I first started with 3, then went back to Fallout 1 and 2, then played New Vegas when it came out.

I can safely say this game does not even do Fallout 3 justice.

I cannot at all recommend this game until the price is cut way down and several patches are issued. Let's dig into why I feel this way. Spoilers ahead.

STORY

You are a man/woman from the pre-war world who gets frozen and sent into the world of Fallout. Spoilers. You care deeply about your son. Always. There is no way to play a character that doesn't care about his or her son all that much. You wake up and wander over to your town and ask your butler what happened. This is the end of your character reacting at all appropriately to waking up in actual hell.

From there the story falls apart. You wander your way through boring quests (more on that later) until you end up finding the guy who kidnapped your kid. Instead of, say, having any options to talk him down or hack his cybernetics (spoiler) or something actually creative, you then kill him. Then you steal his memories, go find the Big Bad of the story, and uh oh your son is the bad guy. But wait! You can side with him at least, even though he is now an old man and leads a tiny enclave of scientists hell bent on murdering people for the sake of "progress." I honestly stopped caring at this point because I saw the "twist" coming from a mile away.

The story boils down to "I WANT MY SON" and then goes to "WHO DO I LIKE MORE??" within the space of a few quests. There's not a real build up from what I saw and the story just did not interest me whatsoever. In Fallout 3, you never had to really "like" your dad. By the time you met him you could act like you really only did it to get closure. In New Vegas, you could tell all the factions to swivel and end things your own way. In this game, there is no option for that. Pick whichever faction annoys you the least, the end. But not really, apparently the world barely changes and the game lets you keep going anyway. Welp.

None of this is helped by the fact you're restricted to just 4 choices for each interaction, which boil down to:

A) Yes
B) No (But yes)
C) Tell me about X, and yes.
D) Haha, dork. Yes.

Sometimes to shake things up, you can get:

E) Pay me more money!!! (Speech check)

I remember in previous Fallout games that I could have so much more choice. Sure, they boiled down to variations of agreeing, asking, or saying no, but at least you could tell what the hell you're going to say and there were options for most every personality. Oh yes, this game suffers the Mass Effect problem of not telling you what you're going to say, going so far as to actually put "SARCASTIC" as a valid option for speech. The voice acting leaves much to be desired. Your character will sound like they're constantly suffering shell-shock unless you happen to stumble into one of the very few quests that make good use of the voice acting. I have only found one.


Bottom line: Do not play this game for the story or to immerse yourself into the character.

RPG ELEMENTS

In Fallout 4, you can gain levels after picking your SPECIAL stats. Your SPECIAL stats really don't affect anything beyond what perks you pick. In theory, high charisma lets you bypass speech checks. In practice, you realize it's completely based on random chance and end up quicksaving and loading to get through each one, rather than say, allocating speech points and trying to find ways to boost said points high enough like in other kinds of games, cough cough.

The perks are mildly interesting sometimes. Annoyingly, many are locked based on your level. You cannot immediately try to master lockpicking or hacking. You are artificially forced into waiting until the game feels like you deserve to be able to pick master locks. This is poor design because suddenly I'm being told how to role-play in my role-playing game.

Also, you are locked into picking exactly 1 perk per level, much like previous Fallout games. Unlike previous games, you do not also get the option to allocate skills. This results in many very boring perks being forced into the system, as well as making character progression feel like it takes way too long. For instance, there are three different perk trees for making you shoot better: One for non-automatic rifles, one for non-automatic pistols, and one for everything automatic. That's three trees of boring "Do shooting but BETTER!!" perks. You also have to waste many levels grabbing all the crafting perks so that you can actually make the shooting enjoyable. I can only feel like this could have been better done if, say, there was some sort of system where I could slowly level up my ability to do things while also picking neat game changing perks...

Very few of the perks, in my opinion, are actually "fun." Most of them involve giving you more crafting options or being able to lockpick/hack things. Maybe the higher level perks are more entertaining, but that would require me grinding levels so I could raise my SPECIAL stats and then pick the perks I want. Again, all one at a time. That makes the game feel like a chore. I play games to avoid my chores.

Bottom line: The RPG elements of this game just don't work well. Raising stats to pick mostly dull perks? Booooring. I hate level grinding with a passion. In previous games, I loved levelling up, because after raising the stats I wanted, I could pick something fun. Now I pick one boring option and I'm done. Darn.

GAMEPLAY

The shooting is improved from Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Enemies react to being hit and I enjoy getting to customize my weapons more thoroughly. That's about the best I can say.

The quests are all variations of "Go here, kill X/Get Y, return to Z." Sometimes they mix it up and make it a little entertaining, such as the quest in Goodneighbor that lets you become a comic book super hero, but most of the time you will be stuck doing dull as dirt quests. This can be traced to the introduction of "radiant" quests, which are infinite and repeatable quests that exist for the sake of level grinding. You will be swamped with these and you will hate them. They all involve going to some place and killing everything to get something, or just plain killing everything.

The highly touted settlement feature is very lackluster. There is almost no point to actually building up settlements beyond your own person satisfaction. They can be turned into money farms, but that's about it. There are building limits for some ungodly reason, so no, you cannot make your settlement as big as you want to. Eventually the game tells you "no more can be built." Objects have a nasty habit of floating above the ground rather than resting on it. Walls do not "snap" together, so good luck making them look nice. Not like walls actually matter, when enemies will just spawn inside your settlement if there is no way to get in.

A dedicated grenade key and sprinting options were wonderful ideas. Too bad they were taken from mods, so I can't give Bethesda any credit for them, along with the entire settlement feature as well! That's right, most of the new content is from mods for New Vegas. 10/10 GOTY.

The radio re-uses songs from Fallout 3 and the CONELRAD mod for New Vegas. That's a serious lack of creativity Bethesda seems to be showing.

Bottom line: Boring quests, decent shooting, poorly-implemented settlement features, and re-used ideas from mods for a previous game.

OVERALL

The game is buggy, buggy, buggy. It won't run for many people, and took me two days of work to get make it run on a friend's computer. It's very boring, hard to role-play in, and has severely dumbed down RPG elements. Go play New Vegas with mods instead and wait for this to drop in price. Fallout 4 is a major disappointment in every regard.

I don't care what anyone says, Specimen 1 is the most dangerous.

This is a pretty spooky game, especially once you start getting further into it. For the lovely price of FREE I'd have to recommend it to anyone who wants to be spooked a little. Maybe not too scary to the more hardcore types who laugh in the face of all danger, but for most people I'd think it's pretty good. Some dangers are easily beaten, however, and the terror starts to wane once you realize how to escape them easily. But hey, it's free and a small download, couldn't hurt to try unless you have a weak heart.