Recent reviews by Zusk

Civ 4 has some of the best strategy experiences tucked into it's own little engine. We have never seen anything like Fall From Heaven 2 for Civ 5 or 6. That alone is worth a massive recommendation.

Fall From Heaven 2 is the premiere 'Might and Magic + Civ' experience, lots of varied and intricate uses of magic, fantasy elements ( Dragons! ) in a way that really takes Civ 4's base mechanics and cranks them up to 11.

There are countless versions of Fall From Heaven 2. For those players on Linux, Master of Mana Extended is the most stable build I have found. Ashes of Erebus is a great mod for beginners, but has some pretty obnoxious crash bugs on Linux. ( This stuff might vary depending on your machine )

This game is unusual, sitting between genres in a way that gives it a very narrow target audience.

This game is effectively split into two halves, each of these halves work in tandem to bolster the other.
The first you are exposed to is a adventure game, complete with Oblivion style NPC schedules and a whole town of NPC's. Expect a lot of bumbling through town, talking to NPC's, trying to find out where to go.
The second you are exposed to, about half way through your playthrough ( Much sooner if you know where to look ) is a fun coding sandbox using a simple scripting language, where you can take the pieces of that town you were put into and manipulate them.

I have never seen a game so split down the middle as Else Heart.Break() is. Both aren't too notable, but its how they work in tandem that makes them more then the sum of their parts.

The early story of the game involves your protagonist getting a job selling some sketchy soda to people in town.
The diaogue writing for this game, which is most of what you see for this part of the game - the first six to eight hours - is pretty bland, characters talk in this frustrating neutral tone that you sort of filter out as white noise after a certain point. It's possible this is a side effect of the translation to english.

I view this starting act as similar to The scene from Mafia II where your character is tasked with a benign job early on lifting boxes. It's meant to make the player rattle against the bars of their cage and yearn for freedom.
The difference between this game, and Mafia's opening act, is that this games opening act lasts a few hours - instead of Mafia's couple minutes.

When you actually unlock the second half of the game and the game starts opening up, it was one of the most satisfying individual moments in gaming that i can remember.
However, it also meant that I didn't really feel any drive to continue with the story. The story from the first act continues after that point. With your character potentially shifting from their soda salesman job to a job more fitting their abilities, but I didn't feel as much drive to continue down that story; it was legitimately just too fun messing with the programming tools and seeing what I could do.

Not everything is exposed to you as soon as you unlock the programming abilities. How the base of the programming in this game works is that objects are like scripts, and they each run a set of instructions. Not every object is the same - some objects, like a powerful computer might have more inherent functions exposed then something like a chair. Being creative with these functions and finding ways to break the system is what drove me for my last few hours of the game - it was a blast.

I wish there was more games like Else Heart.Break().

Human Dispora is a first person shooter released under the Godot engine. It follows a simple level structure similar to something like the original Doom and is pretty generous with its checkpoints, meaning that if you throw your head against it enough you will usually be able to clear the levels.

The games visual style, and story, is evocative of Ultrakill. In some ways giving the game a feeling of being an 'UltraKill-Like'.
About an hour into the game, the game starts featuring vehicle levels. These levels gave me motion sickness and give me the feeling of playing Sonic 06 without actually playing Sonic 06. The games driving sections feel like you covered the Mako from Mass Effect in Vaseline and threw it into a rubber ball pit.
The weapon variety and particle effects are pretty good. ( Funnily enough, there is a greater weapon variety in there then in Starfield... )

Overal - given the game is free - I can say I am happy with my time playing Human Dispora. Give it a try if you are curious!

Operating System: Linux Mint
CPU:Intel Core i5-12400
GPU: GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Lite Hash Rate

Starfield has critical performance issues on Nvidia Linux drivers at the moment.
Nvidia Driver 525 works, but is bottlenecked by your CPU and you could be losing upwards of 20 FPS from what you should be getting. Nvidia Driver 535 doesn't work at all and has a freeze on starting or loading a new game.
There is no built in DLSS support on launch either without mods.

If you are a Linux player, please wait a week or so to play this! Hopefully a lot of these problems will be ironed out.

Aiko's choice is a wonderful 8ish hour little expansion to Shadow Tactics. Play the original first, as it makes the experience carry a lot more weight in the narrative if you do!

For me, this was my Game of the Year.

The trees in this are really something else. Give them a try! The best work the HoI team has done so far!

Come for the cute demon ladies, stay for the world building and fun build-engine inspired fun.
Definitely worth a play!

The team behind HoI4 has allowed it to be such an expressive tool for grand strategy mods! The community has helped evolve this game from being just a little project based in WW2 and helped make it into something really special.

Best stealth game of the generation

The ultimate Boomer game. Relive the past and try to forget about Disney-wars with this expertly crafted RPG.
The steam release is just a bit janky - I would actually suggest picking up the GoG release over this one. As of 2019 I was able to complete a play through without too many hiccups.

Some common pitfalls you are going to encounter playing this game on a modern system.

>Limited resolution and some UI scaling problems
>Greater then 60fps issues that lead to your character getting stuck in place after combat until you create a quick save
>Occasionally, crashes.
>A certain spoiler being very common to find online if you look up quest details on wikis, leading to your experience changing with the main story.

To avoid these pitfalls, I highly recommend you try out this guide.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1283127504

In addition, never use the Wiki's until you finish your first play through if you do not want to be spoiled.