Recent reviews by Fish-E

Honestly if you've played previous Dragon Age games you'll be disappointed by this.

I'm only 10 hours through, but so far I've been introduced to so many characters with little depth I'm wondering why I should care about any of them (it's far too early to be going into their tragic backstories, I can barely remember their name, why do I give a ♥♥♥♥ if you couldn't save your family member in the past). Most of the dialogue is filler and dialogue between your group is annoyingly positive all the time, it's like they have no personality other than to say how great you are every so often. Give me memorable companions like Morrigan (who has shown up but so far, is barely recognisable), Alistair and Oghren.

Combat consists of basically button mashing, it's far from Dragon Age 2 let alone the tactical gameplay from Dragon Age: Origins.

It seems very disconnected from the lore of previous games, with no options when starting the game to load up a previous title's save or select from a list of options.

Spells and perks in previous games where much more meaningful, here they just make you level up all the time but as a result, almost everything you unlock is incredibly generic (+x% to y; how game changing) and you're limited to just three abilities at a time.

etc

I wouldn't recommend this at the current price, if you could get it for ~50% off it'll probably be worth it but only if you basically consider it a different franchise with the Dragon Age name.

It really does feel like the game doesn't know what it is meant to be, who it is targeted at, what genre it wants to be and so it lacks an identity, disillusions existing fans of the franchise whilst also not being particularly appealing to new players.

They should have either done a whole reboot or marketed this as a Dragon Age spinoff; they don't seem to want to associate it with Dragon Age's roots as an RPG, they might have well gone full action adventure game.

Performance is good and the HDR implementation is gorgeous; definitely one of the best I've experienced on PC.

I'm going to try and slog it out and get my money's worth; at least it's less of a disappointment than Starfield. I'd say this is a 7/10 game, which is reflected in the current Steam review score!

This has a very fun gameplay loop - would definetly recommend for the price - each game is quick and you quickly progress.

Still in Early Access, but from the 16 hours I've played so far, it's just as fun as Factorio & Dyson Sphere Program.

Voxels means performance is better, although I'm still far away from the end game and so things may change!

It's probably a good game, but it frequently crashes (even after changing my GPU, lowering all the settings, updating all drivers, formatting Windows etc), which is apparently a common problem that hasn't been fixed by the devs even after a year.

You wait 2 minutes for the game to load up (as it has to compile shaders every single time you start the gane), play for a bit, experience microstuttering, sections where you have to wait for the game's world to load up (even on a NVME Gen 4 SSD - the game really needs DirectStorage support) followed by a crash. It's disappointing.

For reference, specs are:

RTX 4080 Super
i9 12900K
32GB RAM
Samsung 980 Pro 1TB

A few weird choices / priority of playable characters, but otherwise this is a rather fun game.

Shame we'll never get a sequel.

Maybe it's just because I've never played a Diablo game before (and therefore have no frame of reference) but I'm mostly enjoying it so far!

I probably wouldn't buy it for £59.99 though unless you're the sort of player who enjoys playing very similar maps over and over.

Exactly as you remember it.

Except the ending, more heartbreaking than ever.

Basically the same game as you remember, it's a hell of a lot quicker to beat than you remember though.

PS: ♥♥♥♥ Epic for making us wait 3 years to play this.

This, this is what you should be buying Stranger.

Near flawless remake of an already phenomenal game.

Having loved Bethesda games for over 15 years (it's what got me seriously into PC gaming) and spent over 1000 games playing their games (including New Vegas - it was developed by Obsidian but built off of Bethesda's work in Fallout 3 so it counts!) it's really disappointing that I'm writing this.

I can't recommend Starfield - it seems like the only lesson Bethesda learnt from Fallout 4 was not to use a voiced protagonist.

• Just like Fallout 4, there are no skills in the game - your character is instantly a master of all, you do not feel like your character is progressing. Skills are a staple of RPGs!
  
• There are traits, but they're all extremely minor as if they added them on the last day of development.
  
• Just like Fallout 4, there are perks, but they're all extremely generic - it's just +5% carry weight, +10% damage etc as opposed to the types of perks you'd get from games like Fallout 3 or New Vegas where they're actually perks that offer unique functionality!
  
• Just like Fallout 4, they've (all but) removed unique items in order to give the game a Diablo-esque looter system - as opposed the likes of Oblivion or Skyrim, where you'd come across a unique item (in terms of design, functionality and stats) with a unique backstory the game just gives you legendary pistol with +x% to y attribute.
  
• Traders still carry ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, basically forcing you to waste your time on base building, manufacturing etc as opposed to you know, actual roleplaying.

In addition, the performance is bad (and there are so many loading screens, instead of being Open World, the game basically feels like it consists of hundreds of tiny small cells) and everything has been designed around consoles.

I'm going to try and slog my way through the game, as I've already spent nearly £100 on the game + season pass, but instead of buying Starfield I'd recommend the following RPGs instead:

1. Baldur's Gate 3 (came out the month before) - a hell of a lot better than Starfield, they actually respect what their fans want
   
2. The Outer Worlds - probably 1/10th the budget but a lot more fun to play
   
3. Fallout New Vegas
   
4. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
   
5. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
   
6. No Man's Sky - Not an RPG but it's got a hell of a lot better space mechanics!
   
7. Dragon Age: Origins
   
8. Divinity: Original Sin 2
   
9. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
   
10. Cyberpunk 2077
    
11. Final Fantasy IV / VI / VII
    
12. Dark Souls 1 / 2 / 3
    
13. Elden Ring