Recent reviews by Nova

I took a gamble preordering a Sonic game in 2022, but I must say I wasn't disappointed. This game has ups and downs, but I overall loved it and as a life long Sonic fan it makes me happy that frontiers is mostly well received. The titan boss fights go crazy.

Iceborne is the best dlc of all time in my opinion. I dunno why it has mixed reviews overall on steam (could be performance but I've never had issues). It has a ridiculous amount of new monsters and variants considering its a dlc. The master rank versions of existing and new monsters add a really fun difficulty spike to the late game. And iceborne adds what are easily some of my favorite monsters, not to mention that they were still adding free title updates to the expansion for a full year after release. This dlc tops my previous favorite dlcs which were some of the dark souls ones and the witcher 3, and is most definitely worth it especially because it goes on sale more often now I assume.

Stop asking for Elden Ring easy mode. There is an easy mode and it's called sorcery, git gud scrubs lol :)

Millertime is wrong. This game's good.

Live and Learn! Classic gem of a game.

Literally Uncharted style gameplay with a female protagonist and I love it. The story was actually pretty good, which I honestly thought would be fairly basic going into it.
The combat was about as difficult as eating a scoop of ice cream even on the hardest difficulty. The stealthy approach was pretty fun which is always a big thing for me in games. And the parkour/climbing was, well, fairly unresponsive at times for me. I play this game by controller and felt like Lara would just completely whiff grabbing ledges sometimes or with one of the tools later in the game, the wire spool, it just refused to latch onto objects sometimes even though I was within perfectly reasonable range.
Overall very solid game, and personally my favorite out of the reboot trilogy. Just a bit finicky sometimes. Not the type of game to warrant numerous playthroughs either.

Insanely fun and addicting combat that flows very nicely. Playing on nightmare difficulty gives the best experience of the game in my opinion because it forces you to utilize your entire arsenal of weapons. This game's events are also kind of a fun incentive to keep playing, and they give you some nice skins and cosmetics as rewards. Multiplayer is mediocre to me, there's honestly just not much to it.

Despite Scorched Earth being released before the full version of Ark was even released, I think it's a very fun dlc. It keeps the nature of Ark relatively well while adding in a few mythical creatures that aren't related to dinos (golems, wyverns, phoenixes). Scorched still has that fairly primitive feel with tek coming only after the boss fight and element only dropping from the boss. I personally like both the primitive feel and tek feel of later DLCs but I know some people don't like the tek route, so this DLC might be good for those types of people.
Wyverns are fantastic and one of my favorite flyers in Ark (aside from snow owls). Scorched brings in the original 3 variants: poison, fire, and lightning. Fire is personally my favorite but lightning is probably the strongest because the hit detection seems to be a bit better and longer range.
The addition of adobe structures is kind of a welcome one in my opinion. I play mainly pve so when I build it's mostly for looks but also needs functionality. Adobe is actually very good looking to build with to me and it helps play into the whole heat wave mechanic they have in Scorched which is another thing entirely.

On the other hand scorched does have it's downsides as does every map. The aforementioned heat wave mechanic is the first thing that comes to mind. There were days early on where I felt I just had to sit inside my adobe hut to not fully die of the heat wave. They are way too common as well.
The phoenix, while seeming like it would be a sick creature, is one of the most underwhelming creatures in the DLC to me. First of all the taming process is an absolute pain. Second there's only ever one on the entire map at a time (like a unicorn) AND it only spawns during a heatwave. Third even once you tame it it's just not that great of a tame, mediocre at best but honestly wyverns are on the same map and just outclass phoenixes in every way.
Also Wild Card, where is Scorched's ending??? This map feels abandoned at this point and is the only paid DLC map without an ascension ending which is really sad to see. You kill the boss and that's it, no cutscene to lead into abberation. This could be seen as a minor complaint which it kind of is, but I'm not alone in thinking this. I know there's a fair few others out there who want to see Scorched with a proper ending. I can only hope before Ark 2 is out, they polish up an ending for this map.

Overall I would recommend this map to all Ark players. It's still worth a play despite it being more mediocre to me compared to other maps.

In cyberpunk's current state, I have to say I recommend against buying this game to anyone who hasn't purchased it yet. Now my main complaint with the game is mainly performance. So far I'm finding the story to be great and the hacking abilities are pretty fun (combat is mediocre but I'm going as a stealthy hacker so I haven't faced too much head on combat).


There are quite a few bugs I personally have already encountered, as I kinda expected from the launch of a game of this magnitude. It's still worth being noted though because I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that won't wanna deal with lots of bugs and would rather wait till that sort of thing is leveled out. I've currently experienced things from being locked out of a quest advancing after completing said quest's objective (reloading save actually fixed it though) to a visual issue with trees appearing through walls constantly which is currently the most annoying and unimmersive thing for me right now.


Overall performance is very lackluster and yes it's been known for a while that you need a somewhat beefy pc to run this game on decent settings. I currently have a 1060 with an i5 and am trying to run it on mostly medium settings with some things, especially crowd density, tweaked to low. I only get around 40fps in the city and depending on the area sometimes less.

It is still bearable to play and I'm really enjoying it as long as I can overlook these things, but they are some pretty major and annoying issues for me. I wish I could see the beauty of night city without being at 40fps, but I dunno. My suggestion currently is to hold off on buying this game for a little while but follow it very closely. I honestly hope CDPR will fix these things or at least minimalize the issues and bugs in the future, and if they do this review will change.

TL;DR Overall enjoyable game but am recommending against because of underwhelming performance and bugginess. Still gonna play the ♥♥♥♥ outta the story though.

Over 2k hours between 2 accounts and still love this game. 10/10 better than Minecraft.