บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย Rex Bellator

Update March 2024: It's been my intention to update this review for nigh-on two years now. When I first wrote this review back in 2018 the NEXT update had dropped which compelled me to pick up NMS and needless to say I was disappointed and put off by the grind and the simplistic gameplay loop.

However, since then I have gone back to NMS a handful of times and found myself enjoying it far more thanks to the years of non-stop major updates by Hello Games and their expeditions which eliminate much of the grind (most of the time).

While each content update has varied in quality and depth, the cumulative effect has been to give NMS the variety it so desperately needed. Now with yet another major update I am finally updating this review. I am keeping the original below for reference but I cannot, in good conscience, leave my negative review unchanged. No Man's Sky is truly a labor of love for Hello Games and they deserve nothing but praise for remaining steadfast in their support of this game.

NMS may never unseat your personal favorite space trading sim, but it is a technical and artistic achievement that brings thousands of players together to play and explore this ginormous universe that HG has created. It's not the deepest space sim, nor does it aim for realism, but it's fun and, in the end, isn't that why we play games?

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No Man's Sky is the first game in a decade or more of gaming that I truly regret purchasing. I have always had a soft spot for space exploration / trading / combat games - Elite on DOS was one of the first games I ever played on PC - and No Man's Sky, despite its very rough launch (and overblown promises) has been on my radar. My intrigue piqued with the NEXT update and I decide to jump in with both feet only to find myself falling into a pit of quicksand.

The game is beautiful, and no doubt countless screenshots from the developers and community are great at evoking the wonder and sense of scale that NMS gives you very early on. But then as you play, the curtain is slowly pulled back to reveal a very shallow and unsatisfying gaming experience.

Firstly, let me just say of all the open world, survival games on the market that I've played, NMS has got to have one of the WORST introductions of any game in its class. Unlike Minecraft or 7 Days to Die (or many others), where you are dropped in a relatively safe area and encouraged to collect resources in order to craft the necessary tools to open up the rest of the game to you, NMS literally throws you to the wolves. You're dropped on an environmentally hostile planet with limited oxygen and life support which need O2 and sodium to recharge, you also need basic metal to repair your tools and your ship (until then you're essentially grounded), which you're told to mine with your mining laser.

Oh okay, simple enough. Except if you mine for more than 30 seconds, uh oh, here comes an insidious sentinel robot (which inhabit every planet you're on), which almost immediately begins to attack you if you mine too much. Naturally your first instinct is to fight back, doing so will reward you with two more robots bearing down on your position. Fighting them unleashes another wave of robots, this time three and so forth. So basically the lesson to be gleamed from all this is: don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fight. Run.

So you run. And you run. And you run (♫♪so far away♪♫). and then you hide, and then you mine, and then you run some more until you've fixed your ship. But your running isn't over yet because then you're treated with a never-ending breadcrumb trail of quests and hints on unveiling the inner mysteries of the game, something to do with ancient aliens called Anomaly (or something like that) and getting to the galactic center.

So you travel from one planet to another, you upgrade your ship, you engage in some space combat, but after a dozen hours or more it all starts to feel the same. Almost every planet is inhabited by procedurally generated animals (along with aforementioned sentinels). Space is peppered with conveniently (if unrealistically) placed asteroid fields which you will eventually mine, but the mining isn't for making money not really, it's just another means for producing things for the carrot-on-the-stick you're chasing.

This grind - and yes, NMS is extremely grindy for what is essentially a single-player game - wouldn't be so bad if the other aspects of the game were at least interesting. But trading in the game is relatively pointless. Mining is an extremely tedious test of your patience. Space combat is a joke, as even tough enemies seem to just seem to flight in tight circles while taking grazing shots at you. Character interaction is almost nil in the early-to-mid game because you have to learn each alien species' language, so any exchanges with them are purely guessing games of "pick the right response."

And for a space game NMS has one of the worst navigational systems I've ever seen in the genre, as it is almost non-existent; the system that is there becomes awash in numerous, sometimes dozens, of floating markers that you need to somehow hover over and tag and fly toward. The Discovery tab they have for naming/uploading systems to the discovery service is useless for navigation. So if you want to see how many planets are in a particular system their names and what is on those planets -- well good luck with that buddy -- because you literally have to spin in space and look at each planet manually and then fly there.

Ultimately, NMS' gameplay loop of mine/crafting/exploration is fundamentally flawed. Dozens of hours in other open world / survival / crafting games makes you feel like you've accomplished something; you might have a fort or home to be proud of, perhaps a working resource farm of some sort, you have amassed some nice weapons that help you fight off enemies.

I get none of this from NMS. I have 20-30 hours in the game now and I feel like I'm still chasing the next clue while wandering through another random system whose importance is meaningless in the vast sea of stars that make up NMS' galaxy. Part of me just wants to uninstall now and hope a future update fixes this. Part of me wants to go back to see if I can finally unlock one piece of the puzzle but the interminable grinding makes it feel more like a chore than an adventure.

5/10 -- wait for a sale if you really must play No Man's Sky but otherwise skip it until the developers fix its fundamental flaws.

I'm not really sure what the appeal of this game is. As roguelikes go it is vastly inferior to other games in its genre. On the technical side this game is little more than an overblown Flash game one might find on NewGrounds. Peel that away and you're left with a grotesque art style and storyline that seems to appeal to rebellious teenagers (and jaded adults) bitter at the years they were forced to endure Sunday School by their parents. The game's religious overtones and irreverent use of of blood, guts, poop and pee seem to be thrown in to appeal to this lowest common denominator; edgelords who get giddy of going against the grain and sticking it to moral authority.

So if you're Dawkins-thumping neckbeard who enjoys B-grade bullet-hell poop-filled Zelda-esque dungeon crawling Binding of Isaac may be the game for you. For the rest of us, move on to something better.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days isn't a game, it is a travesty. Coming off the heels of the gritty yet memorable first game, K&L2 is a downgrade in every respect.

Kane & Lynch 2 is the equivalent of an amateur artist who wants to make their project the be-all-end-all of all art, desperately borrowing ideas from other great works, throwing it into the project in the mistaken belief that the individual parts will be greater than the sum. Instead, what we're left with is a noisy, unpleasant, shadow of a project that is both a joyless experience, poorly designed and just downright insulting to one's intelligence.

Whereas Kane & Lynch: Dead Men took you across varied landscapes to battle across, from a highway prison break, to a construction site, to battlefields of Cuba, Kane & Lynch 2 is a dreary, monotone, shrill experience that is blinded by the developers' desire to be *edgy* and *cool* all while eschewing everything that made K&L1 memorable.

The entirety of K&L2 is set in gray and depressing Shanghai where you play as Lynch (in the single-player story mode) in a story that can only be described as a comedy of errors, except there is no comedy, only gritty "realism" as a substitute for anything resembling substance.

The entire story deals with the pair's running afoul of an ultra-powerful Shanghai mob boss, the rest of the game is simply an excuse to have you run from one locale to another shooting up gangsters, thugs, and later on, soldiers and killing more Chinese people than Mao Tse Tung.

That's the entire plot of the game.

Furthermore 90 percent of the dialogue is Lynch screaming and Kane yelling at him trying to make sense of the mess they're in. The visuals and story borrow HEAVILY from John Woo movies to film noir classics like Michael Mann's HEAT but without any of the competence or thoughtfulness that makes those movies classics. K&L2 is a pale imitation of these works.

Gameplay is equally poor and badly designed. Almost all guns are extremely imprecise in order to artificially give the aimbotting AI a chance at holding you back. There's also a severe lack of variety of weapons, the majority of which are Chinese-made pistols, assault rifles and shotguns (a disgrace compared to the first one's larger assortment of firearms).

Audio and visuals are equally terrible. The music consists of ambient noise and vocals that grates on the ears; the default visuals were interesting but ultimately you're better off turning off camera effects and enabling steady cam mode in order to avoid the nauseating camera shake.

Once you've fought through one or two levels of the game's story mode you've seen pretty much everything the game has to offer. In the final levels of the game Lynch whines: "they just keep coming, I'm so tired! When will it end?" I feel your pain Lynch, I feel your pain.

Kane & Lynch 2 has all the telltale signs of mismanagement at every level of design, from the game's script, level design, gameplay mechanics, and artistic direction. It is an over-processed game-by-committee, a derivative melange of bad imitation and even worse writing. Multiplayer modes are pretty much dead thus leaving you only with a story mode and arcade mode options.

Whatever you do: Do NOT spend your money on this game. You're better off spending it elsewhere; like donating it to charity, using it to rent movies that this game imitates or buying a better game.

I'm giving this game a qualified thumbs-up simply because I acquired it cheaply during a steam sale and because it is a decent, if flawed, game that's good for killing time but that is it. However, as match-three games go, there are far better titles out there that are more fun and better designed.

This game's major flaw is its emphasis on speed and luck over skill and contradictory gameplay design.

10,000,000's hybrid match-three RPG dungeon crawl system is novel but its flaws quickly become apparent. Match three swords and you can strike an enemy, match three wands and you do a magical attack; match three stone or wood and they become resources you collect to upgrade your HQ which will allow you to further upgrade your weapons. Match three keys and you can open a chest or doors and three chest blocks gives you a chance to acquire a random item.

As you run through a dungeon you're on a timer in which enemies and locked chests cause you to be pushed back to the left side of the screen; run out of time and you're kicked out of the dungeon regardless of your characters' health or armor.

The problem becomes apparent when you realize that, other than stone and wood, you cannot bank on your successful matches. Match three keys to open a chest can cause a cascade that wipes half the screen, including many swords or wands that would have come in handy. Suddenly a dragon pops up and you have absolutely nothing to match against it and thereby ending your run.

The opposite is also true, but less apparent, because keys can be acquired in your inventory. In fact that they are one of the most common drops, unlike - say - food which is necessary to add more time to your dungeon run.

Which brings up the game's next flaw: it's abysmal RNG for drops, damage and/or anything that might be beneficial for the player. With 10M its either feast or famine, therefore making judicious use of items almost pointless.

Ultimately what this all translates to is 10,000,000 becomes a very tedious grind especially at higher difficulties. It is purposely designed to keep you coming back for mindless match-three'ing until you finally win the game, which some people may find enjoyable, but I for one did not (especially in acquiring the last three, hardest achievements).

Doing well at 10,000,000 feels like a fruitless victory, as all too often causing cascades can be more detrimental than beneficial and that is a fundamental flaw in a match-three game.

For this reason I don't recommend this game for anyone looking for a smart match-three game or those who dislike grindy treadmills. However if you're looking for a simple puzzle game with great chiptune music, 10,000,000 is a solid game to play.

If Dead Effect were a zombie movie, it would not be mistaken for a classic like Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, but instead, would be compared to a low budget European knock-off similar to Hell of the Living Dead, which is, at best, a decent zombie flick and at worst very derivative and unoriginal; still derivative and unoriginal doesn't necessarily mean irredeemably bad.

Like the aforementioned movie, Dead Effect borrows A LOT of ideas from better titles in its class. At times it seems like the developers were going for an old school style of first-person shooter like DOOM 3, and just like DOOM 3, Dead Effect is chock-full of claustrophobic, darkly lit sci-fi corridors highlighted with bright neon blues, reds and greens, and populated with tons of copy/pasted science fictiony crates, ramps and walkways.

Environments in Dead Effect are arguably its biggest weakness. Regardless of what chapter you're on everything will start to blend together as the same assets are used over, and over, and over again.

Gameplay wise the game feels like Killing Floor with a story mode tacked on; the story is extremely simple and just an excuse to have you kill a bunch of zombies from one generic sci-fi room to another. The voice acting is bad even by indie game standards.

And yet, despite these glaring flaws, I kept coming back to Dead Effect. For an FPS it's a decent little time-waster you play in between your other regular games. Gun play was okay. Certain guns like the basic pistol, even fully upgraded, are mediocre but the shotgun was incredibly satisfying to use, as was the fully upgraded chain gun. The zombie action was serviceable, it's not Left 4 Dead by any measure, but it was genuinely fun to see zombies explode in geysers of blood and meaty chunks, which this game serves up rather well.

There are about a dozen weapons to unlock which you gain access to by buying them with credits (and gold) you earn by killing zombies. This mechanic for unlocking items is, I believe, a remnant of Dead Effect's origins as a mobile game with micro-transactions, however, the developers were wise enough to not implement them in the PC version.

I acquired this game as part of a bundle, and despite paying a pittance, I feel like I got my money's worth from it; the numerous achievements, unlocks, game modes, and weapon upgrades kept me coming back for some reason and in the end I got a near 20 hours worth of gameplay out of it.

Make no mistake, Dead Effect won't win any prizes. It is not a great game compared to so many other AAA games out there that do what it does only better, but for a game in its price tier/class you could certainly do a lot worse. Because of that, and because it did entertain me for most of that time I am giving it a Recommendation.

Overall, not bad for a student project. Einar's visuals and gameplay are very reminiscent of Ryse: Son of Rome. Only problem is that this game suffers from performance problems, janky animations and clunky combat. It's also very short, you'll be able to beat it in 20-30 minutes give or take. Hopefully the students behind this game can polish it further and expand on what they've developed here; Einar has a lot of promise but right now that's all it has.

I've been playing the Fallout series since the original launched in 1997 and I can confidently say that Fallout 4 is both a great game in its own right and also a great Fallout game with a story that is worthy of the franchise.

But you'd never know this if you went solely by the echochamber of lonely internet neckbeards whose sole hobby in life is to spend their time on message boards steeping themselves in their own gaming dogma instead of, you know, actually playing games for fun.

The truth is that, while these fat-fingered NEET armchair developers sit at home cursing at Bethesda through their monitors, Bethesda has successfully developed a unique formula that combines rich, open-world exploration with action RPG mechanics and memorable storytelling which they have honed over the last two decades; a formula stretching as far back as Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind, neither of which were ever as complex or as deep as many of the TSR-based RPGs that Bethesda aped with their action-rpg titles (but this is something fanboys will never tell you).

Fallout is no different. If you're an insecure genre purist[i.redd.it] you will never - ever - accept the changes Bethesda makes, just as Sunni Jihadis will never accept a ♥♥♥♥♥♥'s mufti teachings.

If you've enjoyed Bethesda's other titles particularly Skyrim or Fallout 3, chances are Fallout 4 is almost sure to please.

Fallout 4 adopts many of Skyrim's gameplay mechanics (skill/perks trees, crafting, home-building) while improving upon many of Fallout 3's shortcomings like poor shooting mechanics, a lack of faction variety and renewable quests.

Storywise, Fallout 4 is a remarkable adventure that explores the future by way of the past, how our memories make us who we are and, with regards to Synths (synthetic humans made by the shadowy Institute), how they even make us human.

By game's end you aren't just going to decide humanity's fate, you will define what humanity is. Anyone who says that Fallout 4's story is poorly written either hasn't played it, is lying, or simply doesn't understand it.

By comparison, New Vegas' two primary factions squabbling over the Hoover Dam and the Vegas Strip out of a lust for power and influence is about as fascinating as the nutritional information on a box of oatmeal. Not to mention how the lead writer literally copy/pastes the college textbook definition of "dialectical materialism" into his dialogue and the fanboys fall over themselves as if the words were divinely inspired.

Fallout 4 isn't perfect, there are areas that Bethesda could have improved upon, but as games go it is a fully featured, post-apocalyptic romp that will keep you coming back for hundreds of hours (my hours alone attest to that). It's smart but it doesn't pretend to be some great philosophical work but then it doesn't need to be; it does what all good games set out to be: a fun, memorable experience.

If Fallout 4 were a food it would be a juicy cheeseburger with a heaping side of fries. New Vegas, by comparison, is a tall glass of pureed wheat grass. New Vegans will loudly insist (over and over) that the latter is better and tastier than the former but the truth is out there for all to see; a truth they have blinded themselves to out of pure envy and spite. It's sad really.

As for Creation Club, the hyperbole and panic that exists around it is overblown, it is completely optional content that no one is required to buy. It allows the community to contribute to mod developers in a curated experience you cannot get in the free mod scene. Anyone who says that CC will kill mods or that it is a pretext to end modding is, like the other haters, lying in order to spread FUD but what can one expect from gaming extremists?

This game is like a passionate but abusive relationship: when it's good, it's really really good and when it's bad it's terrible. Even though I'm giving it a Not Recommended I will likely continue playing it until something better comes along because Rainbow Six Siege, for all its faults, is fairly unique in terms of tactical shooters and Ubisoft knows this.

Few FPS games have the kind of adrenaline-pumping high stakes spikes of stress and relief that Siege brings to the table. That is the extent of my praise for the game. Do with it as you like.

Having said that, Ubisoft has continually mismanaged this game for the last 2-3 years. Their constant tooling and re-tooling of the game adds nothing but confusion and frustration with actual improvements taking years to manifest. Every season brings with it haphazard changes as Ubisoft scrambles to appease high ELO and pro players whose complaints are immediately addressed by Ubisoft.

Meanwhile the game is absolutely AWASH in hackers and smurfs who basically ruin the experience for people who are just trying to find a decent evenly-matched game and Ubisoft looks the other way. Hackers flagrantly post their highlights on YouTube and their accounts continue to exist weeks and weeks after posting.

Then there's the absolutely-lowest-effort practices of Ubisoft devs. There haven't been any new permanent maps in years, the last new one, Outback, came out two years ago. In fact Rainbow Six Siege is probably the ONLY AAA-game on the market that actually CUTS content from its game rather than adding to it. When I started played maps came in day and night time maps; they were removed.

Ubisoft reworks older maps but the reworks more times than not look and feel worse than the older ones; map changes look amateurish replacing once-believable "real world" spaces with large boxy rooms that look like they were created by an intern. One of the signature aspects of Siege that Ubisoft has always touted has been "destructible environments" yet the reworks add tons and tons of impenetrable solid walls. The newest Favela rework demonstrates this perfectly.

These issues are just the tip of the Ubisoft iceberg. I could write a Masters' thesis on the underlying balance, balance changes, matchmaking issues and the toxic playerbase.

So while I will continue to play Siege on and off into the foreseeable future I do so because I have an established group of friends who also continue to play but if I had to do it all over again I probably would have stopped 2 years ago if I'd known it would get this bad.

An excellent mod that makes subtle but appreciable changes to the classic game's visuals. The gameplay remains identical to the original Half-Life 2.

I wish steam reviews would offer a sideways thumb option rather than a straight up/down thumb option, as I don't want to be forced to praise or condemn Day One: Garry's Incident. The deluge of derision this game has received is legendary and I don't want to be party to those kinds of criticisms.

Does that mean Day One: Garry's Incident is a great game? Absolutely not. It's a severely mediocre game but certainly not as bad as other tried-and-true bad games.

It feels more like a demo for something bigger but cut short by lack of funds or time (or both).

Moreover, Day One feels like the developers couldn't settle on what kind of game they wanted to make.

Is it a survival sim? No. It has a loose bit of "survival-lite" mechanics but that's about it. The survival aspect feels completely tacked on and has very little to do with the overall game or story. The survival mechanics are just a surrogate for more traditional ways of healing in other first-person adventures.

Is it an FPS? Barely. As FPS goes Day One is clunky, slow and awkward. The weapons are uninspired and only the pistol and the alien blaster-thingy are any good. The other weapons are pretty useless. The enemies are

It is a rip-roaring Indiana Jones-esque adventure? Maybe but the puzzles and traps are poorly designed as to suck any fun the game might have. The traps throughout are tedious trial-and-error speed bumps that force you to save often. The puzzles are dull and equally tedious; the temple complex in the second act, for example, forces the player to hunt down a half-dozen switches to open up the way to the next level, spread out over a ginormous Mayan temple that dwarfs the player that even running non-stop feels slow.

Garry's Incident should be a lesson to its developers: develop a focus; fine tune your gameplay; make sure it's fun. This is where Garry's Incident fails. I can't help think if the developers had just made the effort they could have had a decent game on their hands but instead opted to make a quick buck and release it in a shoddy state.