Recent reviews by DarkRighteousFistOfLords

Fun game! It reminded me a lot of playing Fallout. Post apocalyptic setting, raiders, taking and defending territory, etc. I enjoyed it overall. I was only disappointed that so much of the game was hidden behind micro-transaction paywalls, that were so typical of the times when this game was released. The game is obviously structured so that you cannot unlock the best weapons or outfits without inordinate amounts of play time and grinding, and the player is constantly tempted to just purchase in-game weapons with real world money, which is insulting and ridiculous. So, it loses points for that nonsense, but the game play is solid, and I loved the world and it's dark evolution from FC5. It also hits well on the nostalgia by bringing back characters from the previous game, faithfully voiced and aged. There's a lot to like and dislike, but overall I had fun playing it. On to the next!

This game was fun as hell. I don't care about the so-called "controversy". We need more games that push the boundaries and make players and the public ask questions about the way things really are in this world. Distinctly felt like playing "Civil War" the game, if the recent movie had a comparable game counterpart. I first played FC5 in October of 2024, just trying to catch up on my backlog of games I've been intending to play for years. Completed 2 full play throughs and thoroughly enjoyed both. Can't wait to continue with other games in the franchise!

I would have to argue that in spite of it's bugs, poor optimization, frame rate issues and technical glitches, the Definitive Edition of San Andreas is still the best version of the game commercially available. The quality of life improvements such as checkpoints and a weapon wheel make the game more forgiving and overall fun to play. Vice City, on the other hand, is an unplayable mess, and I eventually gave up on it and uninstalled. Rockstar should be ashamed.

151 hours in and just finished my second play through. I'd have to say that for me this game is a mixed bag. There's something to like about it, but at the same time, a lot to dislike as well. While it's worth playing, the fun parts are equally matched by frustrating game design that keeps you going back and forth from engagement to irritation. With that being said, this is one of those games that I'm glad to be done with, and while I do think it's worth experiencing once or twice, I can't see myself coming back to it like the first game.

PROS: I thought the characters and voice acting was great. Lawan, voiced by Rosario Dawson is the heart of the game and really steals the show. The city of Villedor is fun to explore, and the parkour mechanics are a definite improvement over the first game. Also, for me the high point of the game was it's music. From the fast-paced synth wave tunes that match the game's tempo while traversing on foot or paragliding, to the end credits song ("Help I'm Alive" by Metric), even to the combat music, I found myself really enjoying this game's soundtrack!

CONS: For me, the worst part of the game is how much it breaks immersion by implementing game mechanics that simply don't make any sense. For instance, you have to activate Windmills to restore enough power to small areas of the city to set up safe zones that are occupied by the faction of your choice - but EVERY windmill is a parkour climbing puzzle, with levitating bars and platforms that have to be navigated all the way to the top - which is ridiculous. I mean, I know it's a game, but no sane person would ever design every Windmill in an entire city as some moving, vertical obstacle course, which quickly becomes a tedious chore when you have to do this nonsense every time.

And every little thing you do is an obstacle course in this game, which, again, becomes a tedious chore. Activating Fast Travel stations means parkouring through yet more obstacle courses to power up all the generators, while avoiding deadly chemicals on the ground! (Think, "The floor is lava"). Activating Electrical Substations, to bring power back to the city, means playing a frustrating, tedious game of connect the cables. Over and over again, every time, with little to no variety in these mundane obstacle courses. Windmills, Fast Travel Stations, Electrical Substations, oh my! All puzzle rooms to be solved, which gets old really fast. I wanted a post-apocalyptic zombie game with melee combat and parkouring. I did NOT want "Parkour Puzzle Rooms", the game.

Another immersion breaking mechanic is that in order to upgrade your equipment into more powerful and effective variants, it requires you to go out and collect Zombie tokens, which you can trade to Craftsmasters who will then upgrade your gear - which is again ridiculous. It begs the question, "Where are the zombies getting their Zombie tokens???" Are the zombies going to work???

So, the zombies in this game literally carry their own private "zombie currency", and before a Craftsmaster will help you help everyone else, you know, by completing quests and doing things for people, they demand an ever increasing amount of zombie tokens, which forces the player to grind and farm zombie tokens if they want better equipment. Another tedious chore. And what are these people spending their zombie money on anyway? You can't actually buy anything with these zombie tokens alone, but they are in SUCH high demand for the best gear. Once again, immersion breaking tedium that pulls you out of the game. No one surviving in a zombie apocalypse is going to go out farming zombies for their hard-earned zombie money, and no craftsmaster worth the title is going to send people out to risk their lives first before helping them with their gear. It makes NO sense whatsoever, and is simply absurd game design.

All in all, the game has it's high and low points, a very mixed bag of good things and bad things. I'd say for me it's about a 5/10 - strictly average, and while it was fun playing through it twice, honestly, it's not a game that I would expect myself to be excited to come back to, mostly because of the myriad of tedious elements that just aren't fun to slog through, and game design that pulls you out of the game. Worth playing once or twice, but probably only once or twice.

Skip this terrible PC port and go with the console version. After about the 5th crash to desktop, I quit. I really wanted to like this game. Never mind that it's been labeled as a GTA clone, it brings enough customization and variety to the table to have its own identity. However, my introduction to the series was actually with SR the Third, which is a vastly superior and more polished product, and so going backwards to SR2 makes it's lack of polish stand out more. The physics are bad, the colors are washed out, the game plays terribly and there are constant crashes and glitches. I enjoyed SR 3rd, IV and even Gat out of Hell very much, but I found this entry just frustrating and boring to play.