Recent reviews by Rock1m1

Initial 3 hour or so impression? Absolutely mind blowing. This is a visual Tour de Force. I actually leaned in closer to my screen during certain moments in the game so far as it ruptured my senses. Beautiful but solemn soundtrack accompanies a very right turned based combat which feels right at home if you play JRPGs.

I am hooked!

Update 1: I am deep into the game now. Expedition 33 is the first game from a new studio, only 33 core devs behind the game, managed to create a masterpiece - one of the best RPGs ever made.

It is so nice to see you old friend! The game is the perfect mixture of old and new. It looks great, but it feels like Oblivion at the same time in all the right areas. Combat feels better, while the game retains the Oblivion simulation under the hood, so the derpy nature of Oblivion we all know and love still remains.

UPDATE: They have been incredibly slow to fix some of the major issues around the game, especially the performance. It took them a month to hand out a couple of fixes, A month, normally these little fixes takes modders days or even a week to inplement. The game desperately needs performance improvement and proper level scaling. All this waiting derailed my experience.

Listening to the credits music as I write this little review. The development team did not spare any budget and love in creating pretty much all important aspects of the game. So much work and attention went into the production of every square inch of the game is astounding.

The combat system improves upon already solid foundation of Remake with synergies. Synergies are powerful moves which takes two people to perform, a successful synergy attack levels up the synergy bar which unlocks synergy actions, which can change the tide of the battle. Hits feels good and agonizing depending on who is in the receiving end - which is mark of a truly great combat system. Honestly, this game has one of the most satisfying combat system I've ever played, makes me wanna try the tough combat challenges.

The story is told beautifully through terrific cutscenes, voice acting and of course absolutely stunning music. Easily one of the best musical productions I have heard in a game. Being open world, there can be right amount of respite between story progression, but this is where the game falters a bit. The game starts with a good amount of open world content to keep you engaged and digest the story until the next part. However, it goes absolutely crazy with side content which feels like it heavily pads the game's length. Which I feel ruins the progression of the game and the padded content is unnecessary because this is by no means a short game. So do yourself a favour, do not try to do every open world content as I did, it will burn you out.

Which is a shame because I actually really enjoyed the open world format in major biomes. Traversal could have been a bit more smoother as characters feels clumsy going into different elevated areas. The actual content you have in these areas are nothing special, often almost textbook open world stuff. Wish it had a bit more hand tailored stuff. Only 2 major biomes was a pain to navigate however, I like they tried to make biomes interesting and different, but some areas I felt they did not hit their mark, but otherwise I actually enjoyed the open world sections. If the next game has open world, it does not need padded content, just a few unique side quests and some exploration can go a long away.

This is where I like to end. Absolutely fantastic game, it easily could have been right up there in one of my favourite games ever if the pacing and padded content did not interrupt the flow of the main game, which is a masterpiece.

9/10

See you in Part III

Thankful I only got this on sale. The script is awful, the voice acting is horrifically cheesy and bad, but... I needed to have a better context to the events of FF VII Remake and then Remake. Honestly in that term, you don't get much but still it is something.

Now, can't wait for Rebirth!

I thought this game would be nothing but an Overwatch clone. To a lot of extent it is, however, there is good amount of alterations to fit Marvel characters on top of Overwatch character arch types and it works.

Very fun game, without spending any money you get access to pretty much all of the game, minus the cosmetics of course. I wish they work on their arenas more cause I get a lot of flash backs to Overwatch arenas every time I play the game, more than the heroes themselves.

Super fun game, well optimised considering it is Unreal Engine 5 game. Definite recommend.

Black Myth Wu Kong is a visual spectacle with some great kinetic combat. For an early version of Unreal Engine 5 game, it runs really well. It however let me down in multiple instances with some horrible boss fights which completely breaks the core design of the game's combat. I had to use guides to basically find to defeat obscure optional bosses in order to make the fights seem more 'fair' and which respects the game's system.

I wish the story was presented in a more simpler terms because if you aren't familiar with the Journey to the West, it will be very hard to follow.

It is a great first outing for the Chinese developer in this AAA space, If they learn from their mistakes then their next game will be a GOTY contender for sure.

Update: True ending improved my opinion about the game, +1. It is hard to achieve it, but it is well worth it!

9/10

If the demo is any indication of FF 16 right now, yeah... it needs a lot of work. Frame times can be uneven when moving around. Cutscenes feel horrible to watch, especially when dropping down from 200fps to 30fps. They need to unlock the engine cutscenes and re-encode the video cutscenes to 60fps at least.

Not sure how to rate this. The game is just meh all from start to finish. It clearly tries to be the spiritual successor to dead space without even understanding what made dead space work in the first place.

The game's biggest asset are the visuals and atmosphere which are all topnotch. But it comes with a price of really bad cpu utilization, only 1 core is pushed hard, providing cpu limited areas when the game struggles to feed the GPU and hence stutters happen.

The game launched without shader compilation but now it compiles shaders at start, but it misses several so you will get shader related stutters at points in the game.

Really wanted to like this game despite the average reviews but the reviews were right. The game is just average and very forgettable without any solid gameplay mechanics to make it stand.

7/10 at best, get it on deep sale.

I heard great things about this game and saved it for a rainy day. UnfortunateIy did not enjoy this game. The character stories are not well thought of, the puzzles which makes you constantly run around the area with the right items and talk to the people. The map in the game doesn't make sense at all.

It started strong, but it quickly lost its legs much faster than I had anticipated. There are much better pixel art side scrollers with puzzle gameplay out there.

Note: My actual playtime is 8.8 hours, but I played where I had no access to the internet

From's DLCs are always much tougher than their base game, but Shadow of Erdtree hits a whole new level of difficulty when it comes to bosses. I usually do not use any summons or spirit ashes of anykind when I do my first playthrough, but even then I was in my breaking point. I took a break, came the next day and suddenly the fight is a lot easier than I remembered and I was finally able to defeat the boss after a few tries. So my advice, if you are stuck, sleep on it or come back later.

Finally the world of Shadow of Erdtree is hauntingly beautiful. Where Elden Ring had high fantasy Lord of the Rings vibes, Shadow is full dark fantasy, eerie but absolutely gorgeous at the same time. From's artists some of the best out there and even then they somehow managed to outdo themselves.

I am still early but I can already see the content in this expansion is staggering. It almost feels like a new entry in the From souls-like franchises.

From and Larian continues to be my favorite game developers. Now if only From improves the technical aspects of the game. The game still has random traversal stutters, places where frame rate drops for no reason. Hoping they get better with the next release.