Recent reviews by gay dragoness pounces you uwu

Played this game with a friend, and frankly there isn't a ton to praise about it. I kinda like the premise of the game, but it feels like one of those games made entirely from a designer's document without any input from actual playtesting. The main mechanic, the monkeys, feel like an excuse to *not* play the game. They are extremely tedious to control, and somehow you rely on them to do things such as craft for you, because they are simply 10x faster at crafting than you are, leading you into a gameplay loop of having to file your taxes to craft a single pane of glass, every time you want to craft one.

Game is rather poor at leading you, and it is very easy to get stuck thinking "what am I supposed to do now?", when the answer is to grab a raft, hope you collide with a lower skull rating island, then start tediously grinding for resources there instead to figure out how to create explosives, with crafting costs (and times) skyrocketing quite fast. Combat is also somewhat unintuitive with enemies enjoying at times full damage immunity if you attack them at certain times that, to us at least, should be just fine.

As for multiplayer, it's very unfinished. Crafting recipe tree is not shared, and certain core gameplay mechanics are limited to the host only. This applies to things such as dismantling crafting benches, walls, etc, and also managing monkeys, which leads to a lot of "hey can you come over and destroy this thing I placed in the wrong spot for me?".

Overall, cool idea on paper, doesn't work at all in practice. Could've benefitted a ton from playtesting and/or patching, because the core of a fun game is here, but you can't quite play it.

Gonna start off by saying that I am not a Fallout fan, though that mostly has come to be through a lack of interest in traditional RPGs and the absolute technical disasters both FO3 and FONV are, and add that my opinions are probably not going to apply to probably the majority of people into this genre of game.

Let's start off with technical things. This is a Bethesda in-house game, so be prepared to fiddle with your configs and weird bugs. The game's performance is extremely poor. Straight up. After messing with the shadows and culling measures in the game and then unlocking the framerate in the configs (as well as adding proper scaling to up-down/left-right mouse movement. Why is this not proper on a PC port out of the box??), I get decent performance, ranging anyhwere between 40 and 110 frames per second. This is accompanied with very frequent game freezes where the game straight up doesn't draw new frames for sometimes seconds at a time. This can make things very frustrating, as minor hiccups will also eat your button inputs, sometimes making it harder to interact with objects, shoot or use items.
Another issue entirely is sometimes your personal instances of places will bug out and the only real way to fix it is to remake them, aka server hop or restarting your game. I had a bug earlier where a key scanner simply would refuse to be interacted with until I server hopped. Searching online, this bug has existed for 4 years now.
To counter these rather odd and very prevalent issues, the game does boast decent landscapes and when I'm not riddled with issues making the game chug, it's satisfying enough to move around and shoot. Good basics.

Interface. Hooh boy, where to begin. It's a Bethesda game, so you know what you're getting into. Lots of crawling through different menus to find the things you need and it's a hassle. You eventually learn where most of the useful things are and get to fight less with the Pip-Boy UI, but I'd still much prefer to see a lot of the unnecessary fluff done away with entirely.
Another minor point: You can loot corpses normally with your interact (E) key, however, you get another option to loot every corpse around you on your reload (R) key. This makes things very very frustrating when you're standing on top of, or running past, a corpse and try and reload, as the game will essentially pause and take you to another menu to start looting. This completely breaks the flow and I can't for the life of me figure out why they decided to put those two actions on the same button.

Gameplay? It's fine. It's only a small step up from the Fallout 3/NV games, but mostly it's just Fallout with shallow MMO level restrictions and (therefore) progression. A good chunk of your time will be spent running around and figuring out how the heck to alleviate your massive carrying load. Now, the game doesn't tell you this, as it assumes you've played Fallout 4, but if you deposit your crafting materials into a stash (default T key when viewing stash), they will still be usable without filling up your inventory, which helps out a ton. That being said, being able to mod weapons is very nice and you get to somewhat customise your loadout to suit your wants or needs, though you're mostly at the mercy of the types of weapon you're allowed to use, which once again come down to your level.


All of this is not to say the game doesn't have decent or even good moments, however my experience has very much been every time I've slipped slightly into enjoying myself, the game grinds to a screeching halt as a massively overlevelled enemy runs me over at random, the game spends 70% of combat freezing up or a progression breaking bug presents itself and I have to restart.

If you somehow don't have these performance issues, and you love open-world scavenging-type Bethesda games, I bet you'd like it a whole lot. For me, personally? I have only played during the free weekend, and am not closely acquainted with previous bugs or issues from the game's launch. As it is now, to me, it's barely tolerable. At least, compared to NV, it hasn't crashed yet. Some of the other glitches can be hilarious, however.

Serious Sam 3 is a very interesting game if you like the idea of watching individual ideas and concepts having tried and make up a game as the very sluggish development hell chugged along for years without resulting in any full standalone experience.

It all starts off with a very Half-Life 2/Call of Duty-ish mishmash of an open-ish city with tons of platforming and debris for (rather meaningless) secrets with otherwise very narrow corridors.
SS3 then has a change of heart as the Doom 3/Quake 4/PREY games pass it by, including a very timely (read: several years late) inclusion of a (poorly implemented) alien hive. We still have switch puzzles in very open areas with not that many recognisable landmarks, making the very big levels feel very same-y and it's easy to feel lost.
After several hours of this mishmash of conflicting game directions, it realises it's supposed to be a Serious Sam game and then throws everything at you, and I mean EVERYTHING. If your least favourite parts of the First and Second Encounter games were the levels with what feels like endless hordes of werebulls and kleers down corridors, this is all you get for some very very exhausting, unsatisfying and drawn out final few levels.

Outside of the game itself showing its complicated relationship with at-the-time current trends, the game also feels more or less like a tech demo. The graphics are not terrible for its time, but the performance fluctuates all over the place - the main menu is especially bad in regards to performance, as the framerate tanks to about 10-20 on average for no real reason, making it feel very unresponsive.

Speaking of the visuals - I don't feel like anybody actually playtested this game? Explosives will kick up clouds of dust and dirt and it makes it impossible to see past them for a couple of seconds. This is a real problem and actually makes the game really hard to enjoy in harder encounters, as a common enemy, the kamikazes, are an enemy that will chase you and explode on death, making other enemies (or even more kamikazes) hard to see and track outside of sound. This particularly becomes a problem in the last few levels, as the game will spoonfeed you literally endless explosives against borderline endless hordes, which you can not see because the entire crammed hallway they're coming from is now black and brown from particle clouds. It very much feels like they valued raw looks and fancy effects over visibility in a game genre that very much requires high visibility to make informed and good split-second decisions on the fly.

Serious Sam 3: BFE is a playable identity crisis, where nothing ever seems to shine. There are a few good voicelines here and there, the guns look nice and the enemy variety isn't terrible, but it is a drag to play, especially as you get further into it and close to the end (which it more or less fakes out a couple of times when you just want to be done).
There are shreds of good ideas and competency on display, but they're all muddled by puzzling performance issues, visibility problems and generally aimless design. If I didn't know better, I would've said the game feels rushed - trying to cram as many things in as possible and shipping.


tl;dr SS3:BFE is what happens when development hell turns to rushing a game out the door with whatever you have, no matter if it works well or not. There are fragments of a good game in here, but the ugliness of lack of direction, very apparent issues and what feels like a lack of playtesting makes it a frustrating journey through a tech demo chasing trends long past.

From the ashes of depravity rises the phoenix of quality. How else to describe The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe? Such a revolutionary step forward in the lineage of one of the most beloved video game properties of all time! The additions and changes made to this expansion will surely resonate in the annals of the history of all media ever made.

It is perhaps true to say that no mistakes are forever etched in stone, for the stone into which The Stanley Parable was carved has itself been transmuted, offering a message of hope to those who have ever erred in their judgement. You are not beyond redemption. You may change, and you may become more, so much more than you were before.

If there is any message to be taken from The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, it is this: What a fortune, a privilige, a joy it is to have had such an experience, it leaves me hopeful that as a community - as a world - there is time for us to become our greatest selves; as great as we could ever dream of in our wildest, most ambitious, visions for a brighter future.

this game slaps my whole bod back to the basement

still trying to learn this game. only gotten a few wins under my belt, but it's very fun

Hal, it's about numbers.

Surpasses Diablo 3 in almost every way imaginable. A ton of customisation, lots of skills to use, lots of weapons and armours to change the way your builds work (and you can even create entire builds around them if you'd like). Seemingly unlimited combinations are available, though GGG's shaky balancing tends to dictate what is actually worth trying. If you love dungeon crawlers, this is a must-play. Only nitpick for F2P would be the limited amount of stash space.

A unique experience like any other. Saying anything here would be spoiling it. If you like meta gaming, this is a definite must-buy.

While still remaining a quite different game compared to the first one, it's one hell of a time. The very rough early access had initially put me off quite a bit, however, while development has been very slow, Tripwire finally got where they wanted and have made a very enjoyable game.