Recent reviews by La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo

Great game, but online requirement for a single player game is never acceptable under any circumstances. I just had an internet outage today, decided to play video games since the internet was out (duh!) and none of my progress was saved except maybe for finishing a level. I got no achievements, no nothing for the progress I actually made in the game and which the game refused to register. IO Interactive sold their souls to the devil back in 2016, and while I'd like the Hitman series to continue, I wouldn't feel bad if they went bankrupt for it.

Yet another case of game developers being anti-consumer and making their games bad in an attempt to thwart piracy, thereby making the pirate's experience probably better for likely not having to deal with this kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at all.

Still one of the best RPGs you can play. Very likely the best Fallout game, but if you're new to the series (e.g. coming from the TV show) you should probably start with 3 first. New Vegas is a very slow burn until you're screaming "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this is amazing!".

Best tool for practicing a foreign language you might be learning. Kids may also find new things to be bullied over, and see disturbingly surreal things such as talking, flying ramen that animate in such a way when they speak that resemble the talking paper bag in Kojima's P.T.

Like other people in the reviews, I, too, fell for the "play for free" trap and... well, I had to buy it.

Assetto Corsa Competizione is great. It's a more focused version of the sandbox that is the original Assetto Corsa, with more convenient ways of getting a balanced race up and running. It's also very comfy on account of the ability to control menus and open up the pause menu without the need for a keyboard and mouse, that is a godsend. ACC's focus on GT3 and tracks from a single licensed racing competition may be interpreted as a lack of content. To be honest, I really wanted to be able to drive in the Nordschleife in this one, and I REALLY miss that. But I also appreciate the small install size (as of writing this, with the game taking up about 13 GB apparently).

One thing that really upsets me and which verges on dealbreaker territory (were it not for me having just bought the game with a sale price, I guess) is that, when playing online, the game has occasional, sudden "sync" type lag spikes that freeze the game and then teleport you up ahead with total loss of control of your car for a good entire second or two. This usually results in crashes and completely ruins races and lap times alike. It also seems to happen when playing single player for some reason, but the spikes are shorter and more rare.

Still, ACC is a great, fun experience, and trying to improve your lap times is kind of addictive. While playing, I highly recommend you listen to some Eurobeat mixes or some Need for Speed music by Rom Di Prisco, it'll really add to the experience.

This game is a masterpiece.

The game is broken, it runs locked at (frame-bound!) 24 FPS out of the box with no way to change this within the game itself. Do not buy this if you don't want to pay to do the developers' job by finding and applying some stupid fix every time you install the game. I in particular buy games on Steam for the convenience of being a few clicks from installing them. This game breaks that.

Instant refund. Play the console versions instead, those at least run at 60 FPS. Valve should be ashamed of selling technically broken games, at least since Konami doesn't seem capable of even that decency anymore.

When the RE2 remake was announced, Capcom devs said "we do it". And they did.

I grew up with the original three Resident Evils along with a bit of CODE: Veronica (I used a relative's Dreamcast to play it, but never got around to finishing it). I don't like RE4 because I don't find it a good survival horror game, it's a good action game but I don't think it's really *Resident Evil*. I loved the first half of RE7, and found the second half (was it a "half" point?) passable -- the former was a true return to form for the series, even if at a different perspective for the player in its gameplay. To be clear, I'm laying out my opinions on other games in the series so you can see where I stand with it, so that if yours are anything like mine, you know there's a good chance that your opinion after you play the RE2 remake reflects mine as well.

To me, you see, Resident Evil isn't about the T-virus or Umbrella corporation, or dragging on plot threads about tired characters that should've ended over a decade ago, or getting thrilled over whether Chris manages to convince Leon to help continue the Redfield bloodline. To me, Resident Evil is about exploring places with weird layouts and intricate architecture, solving bizarrely placed puzzles to progress, while constantly making tough resource management decisions to try and survive the threat of strange, frightening creatures: should I spend my ammunition that I may need later to make that zombie-infested hallway safe, or should I try to run through them, risking my health and thus my even scarcer healing items, assuming I don't give up my life? Should I spend this ink ribbon to save the game now, or should I save it for later when things get tougher, and risk losing precious progress forever if something goes horribly wrong?

The constant need to make all these decisions creates tension. To me, this is the core of Resident Evil.

And I am happy to inform you that the Resident Evil 2 remake delivers. Not only does it deliver this tension, it also delivers other things that made the original great, such as the sadistic pleasure of mutilating zombies to your heart's (ha) content, and such as the subtle film noir atmosphere (although that would be better achieved with a soundtrack closer to the original, as opposed to the more ambient one we get in the remake -- this is relegated to DLC; I find it almost criminal that the original menu sounds are exclusive to the DLC and not default in the remake, as well as the also DLC-exclusive "Resident Evil 2" voice when you start the game being changed from the original, ominous one, the replacement being a bit cringe-inducing). It's joyful to see Capcom take the Resident Evil 4-style gameplay and make an outstanding, real Resident Evil game around it.

I have a couple more complaints about the remake; the length of my description is for detail, not because of great relevance: the first thing, I think, is that there should've been a way to have limited ink-ribbon saves in the standard difficulty. This would've emulated the difficulty of the original perfectly. The standard difficulty is too easy with infinite saves; needing ink ribbons would lend it a bit more of that tension for newcomers. Currently, the only way to have limited saves is in hardcore mode, and that is, and I'm not afraid to admit it, too difficult. With all the difficulty elements together (tougher and more numerous enemies, less health, scarcer ammunition...), the game becomes too tense, and ventures into the realm of frustration and stress. The devs aren't playing around with the naming here: hardcore mode is clearly intended for players who want a real challenge in their second playthrough. I just feel that there should've been a difficulty option that stood somewhere between standard and hardcore, intended for a first playthrough.

Yet, I think hardcore is still the best way to experience the new RE2. If you're not careful with the risks you take and parsimonious with your usage of resources (and let me reiterate: saves are a resource), the game will kick your ass without consideration for whether you're doing well at it or not.

This brings me to the second blemish I find with the game, and that is the bosses: they can be quite bullet spongy, and if you're too low on resources, or wasted your saves way too far before getting to them (or simply before making good preparations), you will get frustrated, and you may even have to consider restarting the game. This is, of course, not considering the standard difficulty, where infinite saves trivialize these issues.

At the end of the day, though, RE2 really delivers. The original RE2 is nearest and dearest to me (despite my finding REmake to be """objectively""" better, the quintessential old-school survival horror). It's a game that is sacred to me, having been my first acquaintance with the series, and one that brings warm fuzzy feelings of childhood nostalgia whenever I play it. The remake does a great job at mixing things up while preserving everything that was iconic. The memory of the old police station layout is seared into your brain, and you will find many things as you remember them, but the layout is not quite as you recall. You will still have to get acquainted with it. Routes are perfectly designed to direct you in a clear progression inside the station and its whereabouts, and once you clear out and explore all of it, new objectives, new threats and new paths are thrown in, and you must adapt. It's all subtly changed from the original, but this is perfect Resident Evil design as you remember it: at its best.

Anyway, finishing remarks: the ideas here are scattered around and I put too much emphasis in (somewhat) minor negative things about the game... but then again I'm kinda sleepy and I'm not going to lose more sleep over a review, lol.

Either way, I HIGHLY recommend this game. If REmake is the quintessential old-school survival horror, RE2 remake is something of a masterpiece in adapting that perfect adventure game-like design to a modern horror game with modern mechanics and graphics.

Hesitation is defeat.

Tekken 7 is a great game, but I can't recommend it because it is too absurdly huge for a freaking fighting game. It takes up about 70 GB, which is more space than Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Arma 3, and a bunch of other games with large worlds -- games where large space requirements feel justifiable and are to be reasonably expected. This wouldn't be much of a problem if you could just install it in the more plentiful storage of an HDD, but in an HDD the load times for every single fight will be long enough that you will get bored of and annoyed from staring at the load screen. Given that Tekken 7 is played as basically sequences of two-minute fights in different stages, if you install it in an HDD you can expect a big chunk of your playtime to be comprised of staring at a loading screen for annoyingly long periods.

Sure, I can always install the game on my NVMe drive, but that has much more limited space, and with Tekken being a game that I like to play doing a few fights on and off, then quitting to do other things, it doesn't feel like a game that can justify competing for space with others that are huge time sinks that will attract me for large, continuous amounts of hours, and that's not to mention my operating system and other non-game software that needs good read speed. This is without bringing up the fact that a large chunk of Tekken 7's data is a bunch of full-motion videos that bring nothing to the gameplay, which just adds insult to injury. In the end, I haven't played Tekken for months because I simply can't bring myself to free up the very large space to install it.

I would like to encourage gamedevs and publishers to be more conscious of the user's storage space, and since Tekken 7 is the very polar opposite of conscious in this regard, I can't bring myself to recommend it.

The Master Chief Collection itself is an absolute labor of love, and even for full price it feels like a steal - especially with the regional pricing; I actually want more people from my country to buy this game collection, as I'm pretty sure it's actually the best game purchase I've made this year.

To be clear, with the single purchase of the collection, you get all of Halo:CE Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4; you also have the option to buy each game individually. The games are listed as DLC because Halo MCC works as a "game content manager" of sorts. When you buy only a single game, you get this "manager" for free, and that game is all the content you have for it. You can later buy each or all of the other games, and that would just add the purchased games as more content to your manager. In this way, the games are considered "DLC" by Steam so they can be under a single game entry in your library, and each game installed or uninstalled via Steam's DLC management tab.

With the new update that effectively releases Halo 4 on PC, we also get cool things like cross-play between PC and Xbox, and even keyboard+mouse support for Xbox players. Also with the new update, you choose a preferred input method, and then you can restrict whether you want only matches with players in the same platform, and whether you want only matches with the same input method as you (though it warns you: introducing such restrictions in your matchmaking can make you wait longer for a match).

Sadly, there's no split-screen multiplayer yet, but I hope it's implemented with a future update.

As for the games themselves, I'm actually getting to experience them for the first time, and at the point of this review I'm a couple levels into Halo 3 (playing the games in release order).

Halo 1 is awesome, it still has this "magic" I recall observing from afar (since I never had an Xbox) when I'd read about it or saw videos of it or listened to its iconic musical theme (which has become iconic not only of this particular game series, but video game culture in general). As some guy in YouTube said, the open levels and intelligent enemies really make the "Combat Evolved" subtitle justified. There's a sandbox-like feeling to the gameplay, where you're encouraged to make the best use of the weapons you have around and the best use of the terrain to outsmart your enemies. The enemies themselves come in different varieties, with different levels of aggression and different patterns of reaction to situations, and you have to take their quirks, strengths and weaknesses into consideration as you make split-second decisions in combat. Battlefields, and even cramped close-quarter levels, actually feel alive (...until you overcome encounters and they feel dead, haha). The biggest issue with Halo 1 is when a certain new class of enemies shows up. People criticize the first Halo for the backtracking in later levels, but to me the biggest problem with it are the encounters with this class of enemy. Where Covenant fights are interesting and with a lot of tactical depth, these other enemies just mindlessly rush you in big numbers, which can feel overwhelming but also pretty boring. Thankfully, a viable strategy is to just rush through them and get to the next area as quickly as you can. Also thankfully, I guess, this enemy is interesting and fear-inspiring in, uh... a plot-wise kind of sense. All in all, though, Halo 1 is a great game, and upon playing it you can also notice the huge influence it had on later first-person shooters, even on PC. Ah, yeah, the Anniversary graphics completely butcher the art style of the original game, but thankfully and amazingly you can switch between "remastered" and original graphics instantly at the press of a single button.

Halo 2, is awesome, too. It greatly improves on pretty much every aspect of the original game, and the Anniversary edition does a much better job with the graphics, better maintaining the original art style (though you can still switch between the two with a button, like before, and to be honest I really dig the original Xbox graphics). Halo 2 is a much more cinematic game than the original, but in a good sense: many battles feel more like big set pieces with lots of things happening around you, but they still feel like little sandboxes with plenty of tactical decisions having to be made by the player. Story-wise, there's greater emphasis on the Covenant and its driving forces, although, probably famously among old Halo fans, the campaign ends pretty damn abruptly, apparently on account of the game going through development hell back in the day, and having content cut and pushed onto Halo 3. Luckily, with the Master Chief Collection you don't need to wait for three years and buy a next-gen console to "finish the fight". Oops, sorry to break the cool effect of my last sentence before going into Halo 3, but I just recalled one thing I really, really hate about Halo 2 Anniversary: the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pre-rendered cutscenes. I get it, they look cool. But they don't feel like they belong in the game, or in a game, for that matter. Real time cutscenes will always be better. Pre-rendered cutscenes will always feel like a gimmick that undermine the actual game's graphics and create an artificial separation between game and story, which kinda goes opposite to what I reckon developers want to achieve when telling a story within a game. I really wish the H2:A devs had just remade the original cutscenes with the new graphics in real time, that would've been much better and more tasteful.

So, Halo 3, which I'm currently playing. Gameplay somehow feels smoother than Halo 2, which already felt pretty damn great, and is now spiced up by new elements like these one-use balls that give you stuff like this shield sphere, or ruin enemy (and your) shields, stuff like that; as well as stuff like being able to rip turrets off the floor and carry them around. The story also feels actually epic, and I'm invested in making humanity's last stand. Graphics are a great improvement over Halo 2 (though not over its Anniversary edition), and there's real-time cutscenes with not so old graphics, now. So far, so great.

Well, anyway, buy Halo MCC. Especially if you haven't played any of the Halo games before, like me. Also, I'm looking forward to revisiting the games I've finished, in co-op. Let's play together if this "early access" review of sorts, heh, has convinced you to buy the collection.