Recent reviews by Ste5e

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cannot be compared to other games for what it gives you. What might not seem totally exciting on the outside looking in, the experience is unmatched. Once you get a feeling for the game, you'll be hooked. The Enhanced Edition of Shadow of Chernobyl is an upgrade over the original. There are rough edges, but I wouldn't say they detract from the overall experience. Having completed the game front to back with no issues, it's an absolute blast and one of the most challenging and difficult games out there.

This is one game that will stick with you for a while. It's a horror/thriller low-poly hiking adventure with a story that will make you question so many different things all at once. The atmosphere and level design are something else, and the gameplay keeps going. Truly one of the most creative games I have played in so long, and I can't wait to replay it.

When this game is good, it's extremely enjoyable. When it's bad, it's usually because the game is Unreal Engine 5, and god awful. Memory leaks, FPS swings entering a town or in certain parts of the game, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ global illumination making it near impossible to see in certain parts of the game which is very annoying in the last level. A game requiring a mixture of upscaling and frame-gen is not a well-made game in my opinion. Requiring players to use frame-gen to induce input latency is even worse in an FPS game.

There's a lot I enjoyed about the game. While I think there's only so much you can do with this setting across four games, it does drag out a bit, and I really was starting to fall asleep with the writing until the 30 hour mark or so in the main story, when certain characters finally show up. The combat is fun, especially when you find stronger weapons. The gameplay outside of combat is pretty trivial and amounts to nothing more than repeated fetch-quests and long hiking expeditions. Walking 1-2km per main mission is very much a thing. The swamps was not my favorite part to deal with, especially when it's hard-coded with a Chimera and an Emission and the whole place sucks to figure out how to navigate. Hard-coding things like that (I feel) take away from the open nature of the Zone.

As far as immersion goes, you could very easily find yourself engrossed in the world and taking in the sights and finding artifacts. However, as you play, you realize that your guns wear down quite a bit and are a little ridiculous to repair. Having to pay the upkeep fees to keep your customized weaponry going is not ideal, given that randomly-made NPC quests like doing some baby-fetch quest don't pay nearly enough compared to the main missions, killing almost any drive to go out and explore using your cool tech. Main missions pay out 10K+ where crappy bartender missions might pay out a solid 1K. You're forced to use crappy weapons to do these runs to save on money, but then you might just consider saving yourself the time and ignoring them altogether, killing any kind of attachment you might have to the Zone.

There are bugs, and I encountered them even in 1.0.3. A certain town can't be saved because doors will be locked when they really shouldn't be. Until this is fixed, avoid this town when it needs you. Given that this is a major town for your personal story-telling, having a bug ruin it, again, kills any immersion or connection you might have.

Overall, the game has a level of enjoyment I have not found anywhere else in a long time, but it's hampered by the game-ruining bugs, low-quality performance, long-distance hiking, and weird economy imbalance. Given enough time for them to resolve issues or modders to come in and spruce up the place, I have hope this game will be a lot better in the future. If you can tolerate the above, it's a solid and beautiful game. Though some may agree, it's not the greatest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game in the series, and the other titles would be worth checking out if you really want to dig into the compelling world GSC have built up.

It's looking like a PS5

Love this game, but ♥♥♥♥ Microsoft for closing Tango Gameworks.

As I wait for the network aspects to improve, I'm going back to Titan Quest.

I wish there was a middle option for this game, because while I believe I enjoyed playing the game and stuck through the story and all DLCs, the experience itself is a mess and is not really a great RPG as a whole. There's a degree of flexibility when designing your character, but the perk system to unlock game-changing abilities is so inadequate it only leaves very few builds actually feeling satisfying.

Pros:
* great set design and unique areas, colors are sometimes very oversaturated or too bright/too dark, but set design is good
* character dialogue, on average, is pretty enjoyable and at times self-aware it's a video game so doesn't get too tropey. Characters coming together in groups makes me sometimes want to listen in to see what they're doing on-board
* gunplay feels better than most games, very snappy and hitboxes are good, bullets go where you want them to
* activatable companion abilities to make them more than a guy who stands behind you and shoots
* science weapons make the game a bit more interesting with unique effects like Mind Control or Shrink Ray, worth the point investment
* quick travel is generous and lets you load into the ship for immediate take-off

Cons:
* bland story with meaningless choices; impacts are never felt, good guys are objectively good, bad guys are so far-from believable I would be shocked if anyone could actually side with them or find them even remotely interesting to pick. You can decimate an entire town and it won't even change the game in a slight manner for you later on, other than which ending dialogue is played. Mostly a binary story a la Mass Effect; go good and save everyone, or go bad and kill all good people.
* enemies are absolutely dumb, and stick out of cover for too long, stand still not doing anything for weird pauses, and are really only a threat on the hardest difficulty where they do the most damage. If you play Counter-Strike, this game will be akin to playing the target shooting course range for about 15 hours.
* build variety is so uninteresting it's not even funny. Few perks offer game-changing alterations, while other perks are just "carry more items" or "get more money from vendors".
* money in this game just doesn't matter; there's nothing important to buy other than quest progress.
* item progression in this game is horrid, there's about three tiers of each gun variety and maybe about a handful of different weapon types, ranging from pistol to machine gun to sniper rifle. Modifications to these guns is either changing it's elemental type, adds a zoom, or makes it do a tiny bit more damage. Science weapons like I mentioned are really the only breath of fresh air.
* DLCs are both pretty snooze-festy. Gorgon is not very interesting and is a ton of fetch-questing. Murder is a bit more interesting, but unsurprising and still suffers from a bit of fetch-questing.
* Lack of anything interesting or fun or open-worldy. NPCs stand around in fixed positions, no one sleeps, can't pickpocket anyone, no hacking minigames, no lockpicking minigames.
* Lot of item cruft and junk will clutter your backpack so often and give you a ton of trash you'll probably never want to figure out when and how to use. Way too many consumable items that I have never bothered even using.
* If you wanted a crafting system for all the weird stuff you collect - there is no crafting system.

I will probably play the game one extra time, but the variety really hurts the creativity and fun one could have. I am a big fan of Fallout New Vegas, KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol, but this game is such a far cry from Obsidian's origins that it's painful to say that this game came from the same company. I also wouldn't recommend the upgrade to Spacer's Choice because it suffers from performance issue hell, costs money, and requires you to download another 50GB.

I think, if you're a fan of any classical JRPG akin to Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy, you're going to find a lot to love with this game.

Pros:
+ The story is pretty interesting and tells a tale of multiple characters with a wide array of backgrounds. I didn't think I would care so much about some of these characters, but they're all great (so far)
+ The combat system is interesting and decisions matter a lot more with this game. The gripes I have with other RPGs become skill sweep simulators (using your biggest highest damage AoE every turn) is that there is never any punish for it, where this game there is a degree of punish for spamming if left unchecked. You get rewarded for developing new strategies and sometimes have to develop new strategies on the fly.
+ The open world aspect is nice and you can roam around for quite a bit and get lost easily. Several hours of mine is me vibing out in the plains kind of aimlessly walking around exploring, and then I finally realized there's a map button. There are free roam quests you can do that'll give you very generous rewards
+ Very Steam Deck battery life efficient, lasting well over 6+ hours on a full battery.
+ Beautiful pixel art everywhere and tons of cute squirrels and rabbits with plenty of dogs to pet.

Nitpicks:
- Enemy design can be kind of trial-and-error, and you'll often not win an encounter on the first try if they throw weird things at you. Sometimes you'll encounter a random enemy and straight up lose because you weren't spec'd out for the encounter, not because of player skill, but simply item setup and not having X or Y skills learned. Boss encounters I'd say are completely fine, but there are some random enemies that can wipe you if they go back-to-back without any prior knowledge of their moves.
- Skill learning is probably the most confusing mechanic. There is no level up system, and all skills are gained by progressing through story/questing. Most skills in this game tend to be either useful, or actual garbage you should never take. You can sort of grind monster fights for XP to level up skills, but I wouldn't say that's a requirement to actually beat the game for the most part. It comes down a lot to skill usage and gear optimization.
- Ultimate moves; this is a fun mechanic that I enjoy, but however it's really only good on a few characters. One character's usage of it is the equivalent of smacking monsters with a Runescape Dragon Warhammer, ramping up how quickly the fight will end, while others are plain boring "deal damage to one enemy/all enemies". You'll only use the boring ult moves if your'e story-locked with the characters, and there doesn't seem to be any system to improve these boring ones. Unless you consider how fast you gain meter to be the improvement, then I suppose it's not the end of the world. I'd still stick to the Dragon Warhammer.

Overall I highly recommend this game to everyone and can't stop playing it. It has something that appeals to everyone.

Floowandereeze good, everything else bad. Believe in the heart of the birds.

Overall, good game, lots of cards, easy crafting system to use. Not a lot of time is required to build out a deck versus Duel Links which takes forever time. Good game for Yugioh fans, but be prepared to play a lot of Maxx "C" and Ash Blossom.

If you like Doom, Heretic, Quake, Half-Life or Serious Sam, you will like Dusk. It is a pure product of love and is done so well that I don't think my words alone express how great this game is.

The game lets you go off the walls bananas while fighting hordes of enemies. Sometimes literally; you will have to climb walls. Bounce pads, huge open environments, wide array of destructive weapons will leave you feeling good as you bunny-hop past enemies at the speed of light while 180-hunting rifle flicking. Then the smaller, more cramp levels will give you the feeling of playing Doom as you super-shotgun enemies twenty feet back into rivers of lava as you try to navigate spooky labyrinths to collect keys to escape.

This game is also brutal and doesn't hold punches back when it comes to difficulty. It rewards smart players who make use of their tools and environments, and cautious players who make sure to check every corner or possible trap in a room. The level design is so great in many levels, but in small cases, I was walking around lost until I really checked every nook and cranny til I found the next key.

Overall, great game, but I wish it had some Workshop support to push the game further. Highly recommended for old school FPS lovers.