Recent reviews by 'Strict

Ok, so I am one of those weird people that love playing trading games and comparing prices in different towns to get the best deals. But when this game came out I just thought "pfffft, walking simulator.....this won't be for me at all" so I never bought it but still had some weird nagging feeling that I might enjoy it if I bought it on sale but the sales either didn't lower the price enough or it coincided with some other game I wanted to buy more being on sale.

Cue Aprils Humble Bundle monthly and the game being included and I told my friend and I quote: "I'm so gonna regret installing this game....but I've been weirdly interested in it since it came out...."

So I started playing it and I have to say, the story made no sense at all....they never explained (unless I missed it) what a bridge is.....what a voidout is and so on. (Probably will happen later in, I'm 23 hours in but only finished 2 acts of like 15 or whatever)

So I just kind of ignored the story (but I for once watched every cutscene which I normally don't do anymore) so maybe "ignore" is the wrong word......but I was trying to understand it but it never seemed to explain it.

Anyway, I played the game and ran around delivering perfect items in Act one, never had a single item with any damage (unless pre-existing when I picked up a dropped item from another player) and I was enjoying the game, especially when the bike happened, saved me so much time and made it easier to do the max weight deliveries =)

Then the first boss-fight happened, I expected it to be a creepy and hard fight, but it was just a large squid that hit me once and then it died......which was perfect cause once the BT's started happening I had been expecting jumpscares galore (only been 2 so far and they were in cutscenes and quite obvious).

Now I'm in act 3 and building a highway together with the chinese (there's only like 30 western names that I've seen in the player lists so far =) and I'm having a blast.

The one criticism I have of the game is that the controls get very clunky some times.

I've only lost cargo twice (and therefore 2 rage-quits) when I've placed a ladder over a river and then my char refusing to turn correctly which then made me walk next to the damn ladder and falling into the river.

So, I'm a big XCOM-fan and have been since the very first game back in the day. So when I saw that the people behind the remakes of XCOM also made a card game I was sold =)

The combat is great, exploration is fun (Abbey) it even has some....I don't wanna call them "puzzles" really but they are......"things you can solve".

Ok, the conversations in the game aren't great, they are trying too hard with some jokes (almost as bad as the latest Borderlands games), there has been two jokes so far that actually made me smile but the rest have been really bad or not terrible.

I started the game on 60 FPS but with some serious lag and stuttering, loading a new mission could take up to 2 minutes some times.......couldn't figure out what it was with the settings, changing them did almost nothing.

Then I remembered that the ******* pointless 2K launcher has been causing me problems in other games so I disabled it and it made 99% of the problems go away. I now have a stable FPS of 60, cutscenes load in super quick.

I enjoy the combat so much that I've actually only done 2 story missions in almost 32 hours =p

I really like this game but I suck at being creative and making bases/ships work well so I can't get very far in this game, I keep expanding but apparently I don't know how to build a ship that lasts =p

Ok, I've played every single game in the series since the CM days (except for FM22), and I have to say that this might be the last one I ever buy.

The throwins and passing is still broken since FM21 or maybe even earlier (as in when your team just gives up and throws the ball to the opposition even if they have people on their own team to throw to.) The game just decides that since you're a lower ranked team you shouldn't be able to beat the top team so it needs to give them a counterattack and then your guy with 18 Passing can't make a 2 meter pass anymore.

Also...the main changes from FM21 to FM23 seems to just be some graphical or name change ones.

The conversations in the game are still as pointless, I don't even read the questions in press conferences cause I still know all the answers since FM21 cause they are exactly the same and I know what will work.

Ok this is VERY early into the game. I checked the demo out after watching Splattercat playing it and I weirdly enough enjoyed it.

Now the game is out and I've been having fun, I'm just unsure of how long the game will keep it's appeal. Will give it an upvote for now, might change it later if I get bored after 5 hours and there's nothing gamechanging coming =)

Edit: 3 hours in now and everything is unlocked (it was unlocked before my last run but I had to do one more to see if there was anything else).

So for almost 20 Euros I can't say it's worth it if you're like me and feel like a game is finished once you've done everything.

But I will leave the review as a positive one since the developer said he's gonna add more things to the game, so we'll see later down the line if this will stay positive or not =)

I really like Outriders base game, sure it had a terrible starting few weeks and it lost a lot of players cause of that and got a lot of bad press (fully deserved). But they did fix the connection issues (at least for me here in Europe, I hear some people still have problems with it).

Anyway, the DLC; I bought it to get the 2 days headstart and I enjoyed it for an hour.....then the game crashed again. This was fixed the day after and now I haven't had a single crash or connection problem since then.

The DLC is a bit expensive for what it gives/adds, it's also a bit short and it lacks variety so I can't really give it a full thumbs up....but I am having fun in the game and if they would keep updating it and adding some stuff (like making randomized maps/enemies it would be a solid 75+% reviewed game).

I really want to like this game cause it looks like it should be good (I've bought it several times) but I've given up on it every time. Now I got it cheap and I kept it but my god the bugs..... I've played the campaign several times but once the guy that's supposed to burn your inn down just stopped in the doorway. So I had to reload, next time it finished like it should but then when Act 2 started I couldn't get a loan.

Finally beat Act 2 after several attempts/reloads but now I have to decide between which of the guys to help, the seer or the.....whatever he is and I can't finish her side, if I send an Adventurer out they just never leave so I have to finish the banker guys quest instead.

Then decided to play Sandbox but in my game I have one of those things that break barrels and drink what's inside it and it never leaves but I can't afford to buy a cat and all the stuff needed for it.
Then after raging about that and reloading again 3 of my employers are now stuck outside of the map (they are on the screen but one is stuck in a rock, one in a river and one inside a tree, I can't fire them and if I reload they are still there.

Also, built a washroom had a guy going to get changed then 3 of my servers went on a break and they all wanted to talk to him so he never got to take his bath....now noone can use the bathtub which I didn't figure out for a long time, if you sell the tub though and buy a new one it will work but this shouldn't be a thing...

I will keep playing the game cause I kind of enjoy the parts that do work but the bugs are just starting to do some serious mental damage to me =p

Great game for coop or SP, updates slowed down cause of corona of course but they still managed to add quite a lot when the updates do come out

Bought this game on GOG when it came out, played the first 3 floors or so but then forgot about the game.

Got it again in the Humble Bundle a few days ago and decided that I was gonna give it another go.
So I'm the kind of gamer that buys a lot of games but never finish any, this game I did finish cause I really liked the puzzles and the amazing (but far too few lore videos). Battles got kind of boring after a while when you've levelled up and been lucky with getting the right skills. I actually forgot to level my heroes up for the last 4-5 floors cause I could just walk through all but 2 battles. (Finally remembered 5 minutes before the final boss fight).

But yeah, I wasn't playing on the hardest difficulty, if I had I wouldn't have finished the game so quickly.
This is one of the few games that I actually wanted to finish and that I didn't skip the lore in (which I normally do, when I see a cutscene my usual reaction is to just spam Escape/space).

Down to the downsides of the game:

The game crashed twice for me, so not too bad.
Some times the game has problems with stairs and pathing. You can't click on a path that's next to yours but requires that you cross a bridge. And on a certain floor (sewers) it took me almost 2 minutes to get up a staircase cause the game didn't realize the stairs was there.
Battles get very repetitive and loses the strategic part once you get Whisper in your party cause then you won't look at the resistances any more.


I did enjoy the choices you have to make in the game, not so much for the moral part it's just that I've always enjoyed the +1 -1 thing for how people in games like you/each other (not sure how to explain that....forgot the word for it =)
I really liked the stats on the equipment and how that worked in the game, had some issues with certain chars dying before I learned my mistake (like when one of my chars had a -8HP per second and I didn't understand why they kept dying so damn fast, or the -3hp per hit that I also missed =)

Didn't expect to like this game much cause of the change from 3D brawler (or whatever to call the Yakuza games) to turnbased JRPG.

But It still kept it's charm, the intense story and the studiply funny sidequests.

It's not as good as Yakuza 0 or the Kiwami versions of the first and second game but it's for sure a fun game to play =)