Recent reviews by Malfeasance

IMO the effort to simply traverse the environment of this DLC isn't worth the annoyance. Maybe I'm just getting too old to appreciate the difficulty, but it feels more artificial than ever, especially with the nerfs to poise in DS3. Trading damage is pretty much impossible since you just get staggered right out of your swing, and of course enemies seem to have infinite stamina. They also gain hyper armor at the strangest times as well, arbitrarily powering through your damaging swings to deliver a 2 or 3-hit stunlock combo that will assuredly kill you when you least expect it.

The Bloodborne influence is even more clear in the DLC, and it isn't doing the series any favors. I can't count how many times I've been staggered out of an almost finished swing because the enemy animation was faster or they hypered, and it's one of the most frustrating gameplay experiences in recent memory. It works for Bloodborne because you have a chance to fight back and regain most of your lost health, but obviously that isn't the case in Dark Souls.

At this point I would rather just leave the rest of the DLC unfinished and save my sanity. Just the thought of what it's going to take to get back to where I died last is enough to put me off. There's a difference between challenging yet fun and just straight nut-slapping you for trying, and I feel like this DLC especially is in the latter category.

As of earlier this year (2019) I finally ended up finishing TRC, and I view it in a much more favorable light after having two of the best boss fights in the series so far in Midir and Gael.

I do stand by what I said about certain sections of the map being incredibly frustrating to pass, especially from the fire just after the first Judicator to the Ringed City Streets fire. I had it easier getting past the angels and died fewer times fighting Gael than I did progressing through that section of the map.

I left TRC with a positive feeling though, and do sincerely hope we see a return to the Souls series in some form eventually.

Word of wisdom to fellow Steam users: Test your games when you buy them regardless of when you plan on actually playing them. I've learned this the hard way with this game.

I was about 5 minutes into the menus when I realized that the static/popping with the music wasn't normal. I pretty much knew straight off what it was, and a quick Google search confirmed it: apparently, a patch at some point in 2016 broke the 192 kHz audio setting in Windows, causing all the static, and it was never fixed. The only other game I know of that has this issue is No Man's Sky. Let that sink in for a bit.

And of course I was denied a refund because I purchased the game during the Steam Winter sale back in December. Call me petty for even pursuing one if you will (I could just change settings in Windows every single time I want to play, but shouldn't have to), but I don't believe in supporting broken products.

An unfortunate waste of $15, but a lesson learned as well.

There's not much to say that hasn't already been said about it, so I'll just keep it minimal.

If you're looking for a long, gameplay driven RPG experience with tons of replayability, look elsewhere. This is essentially an interactive walking simulator with light combat elements, mostly filled with repetitive (for a reason) puzzles that are fairly one dimensional and easy to solve. The entire point here is the experience.

For $30, even at 6 or 7 hours of gameplay, it's worth it to immerse yourself in Senua's world, unraveling her past and why she's so deep into her psychosis. The visuals are really good, as are the animations and sound design. The constant bombardment of voices Senua hears really gives an idea of how hard is must be to maintain a positive daily life with such mental illnesses.

I give Ninja Theory a ton of credit, as well as all the actors involved, especially Senua's; it must have been really challenging to get this one right.

Well since my review of E:D is on the Horizons store page, I'll sum up what I said there and add some more relevant info, having just played a bit more after a year or so, and once again thrown in the towel:

This is grind, the game. Grind. Get used to that word. I've heard Warframe is grindy. I'm not sure how it compares to E:D, but I now know I'll never play it. Now to the bulk of what I want to say:

This game is absolutely not worth it if you don't enjoy grind on levels that are far beyond what even Blizzard themselves can comprehend, if you can believe that. There still is no end game, and there still really isn't any meaningful PvE content to speak of outside of missions on the mission board, which are copies of the same thing over and over again for sub-par pay. Lately FDev have been making moves towards adding Thargoid aliens which may present some meaningful content, but it's rolling out far too slowly to be of interest except for a couple times a year if that. As people said over a year ago now, the game is as deep as a puddle but as wide as a lake. One of the more recent (nvm, just realized this was a year and a half ago, so in a year and a half they managed to add engineers, fighter bays and multi-crew MP, and avatars. Wow.) updates that I wanted to check out added in engineers, around 15 or so NPCs that have the ability to buff your ship components. Each NPC consists of "hearing" about them, actually gaining access to them through a task, rep grind, mission grind etc, and then having to level them up via either spamming their upgrades on your parts, or doing a specific thing for each of them, such as selling commodities, exploration data, etc. I know to gain access to a one engineer, you need 500 tons of ore mined yourself, and another requires a 5000 light year journey. At least one requires a system permit, which means you get to enjoy hours of tedious rep grinding before even meeting him.

Adding upgrades generally requires materials found through vehicular exploration and collection on planets, and also special non-cargo data which is found via scanning wakes, destroying several different types of ships through RES farming or interdiction, etc.

Do you see the problem here? If not let me break down what you need to get level 5 engineered FSD upgrades:

The engineer herself is available immediately, no issue there. You must travel 300 light years away from where you started your career in order to meet her. Again, not too much of an issue there. Now here's where the fun starts. Level 1 upgrades for, say, FSD range require a certain type of data from scanning wakes. Level 2 also requires these, plus chemical processors, found from salvaging transport type ships, USS or mission rewards. This means that you either need to find ships to salvage or complete missions that offer them as a reward. That's a lot of RNG and hunting around. Level 3 requires different wake scan data, processors and also phosphorus. Time to go SRV around some planets/moons, and make sure you pick the correct type of planet/moon to farm, or you won't get the correct minerals. 4 and 5 require increasingly rare scan data, planet materials and different cargo ship salvage. This is all just for one upgrade path, on one engineer, out of the many parts and engineers there are. This is also before mentioning that applying upgrades is an absurd RNG roll of negative and positive effects, so you'll need many, many components, scans and planetary minerals for upgrading before attempting them all if you want decent rolls.

It's grind, grind, grind and RNG all the way down. Not to mention the fact that you need to make certain levels (usually 4) with an engineer before they'll tell you about more of them, and then the process starts again with a new one. Some are even useless, like Marco Qwent. He's gated behind the aformentioned system permit and doesn't give any more than level 4 upgrades. He's a useless, grind-filled stepping stone to better engineers.

This is all before realizing that making credits is an idea that FDev are constantly at war with. A new big credit making solution will come up every few months and FDev will nerf it to the ground, repeated ad nauseum. RES farming is still probably the most constistent way to make credits in the game, even now. Most missions don't grant appropriate amounts of credits for your skill level, which are pretty much a grind to get as well. In general, missions require both rank and rep with the locals at whatever station you decide to start at. Grind. Grind. Grind, it's all you do in this game.

On top of all that, you'll need to grind in order to unlock some ships. Anything Imperial or Federal is two different factions that you'll need to do missions for, and by exploiting "board flipping," aka logging in and out between solo and open play (something FDev frown upon, apparently), it took me something like 8-12 hours of just doing that rep grind to get to rear admiral federal rank for the corvette. It's mind numbingly boring.

So to sum up, for $30 I suppose you could enjoy exploring and seeing the sights (some stations are really wonderful, for example) if you're big into space, and combat will be entertaining for awhile, but I'd strongly suggest waiting for a sale. As mentioned in my Horizons review, I won't be supporting FDev anymore in the future. I honestly regret purchasing Horizons as it is. It's still pretty viable to play without the expansion if you just want to dip into exploration or combat. I'm pretty sure the NPCs don't have access to engineered ships, so you won't be at any sort of disadvantage in doing so. The Horizons grinds will just burn you out and bore you to tears before you even have time to regret your decision to purchase it. I'm not even sure if you have to buy them separately or not anymore tbh, so you may not have to worry about that.

(Edit): I will also add that there is another positive aspect to the game, if you're the social type: There are private groups available, such as Mobius PVE, and if you like to be involved in large scale projects, to a limited extent, then this game might interest you for that reason. For example, very recently a group of players has decided to fully blockade a system in an attempt to force one of the controlling factions out. This will actually have some consequences, such as limiting the amount of credits that are coming into and going out of the system, which will cause an economic failure. So in regards to the community, you may find things to enjoy about it, in a similar way to how you might enjoy GTA 5 RP or WoW RP over raiding or dedicated PvP, for example.

I will also give proper credit to the sound design team. Their talents are massively wasted on this project. You guys rock. I hope to see you all on a more worthy game someday.

Besides all that, I just cannot comprehend FDev. People have been saying off and on since the game was released that it lacked meaningful things to do (an eventual end-goal set by the devs themselves, not the individual), and that still hasn't changed. You'll be making your own fun here. Worse yet, such content will almost certainly be gated behind either huge grinds, as everything has been so far, or paid DLC.

Let's be honest: likely both. What a disappointment.

11-2024 update:

Check out the game again because there's a new ship. Spend 30 minutes looking for it where it's supposed to be, then discover that FDev now time gates in-game credit ship purchases for 90 days after releasing them for "early access" via paid currency.

They just make it too easy to remain uninstalled. I'm so glad I stopped spending money on this game after Horizons.

Updated for Enhance Edition.

Not much to say that hasn't already been said, except that this is still one of the best RPG experiences out there. EE didn't really change anything terribly drastic for me since I hadn't played Lone Wolf prior to it (it got nerfed pretty significantly in EE). There were some character changes here and there that I noticed, mostly story related and VO. The new experience curve is wonderful though, incentivizing actually completing or nearly completing all the quests in each zone. Level 20 is now pretty firmly the cap unless you go on some mega killing sprees throughout and meticulously finish every quest. Also because of this I didn't feel it was necessary to replace gear as often which was good. Money is pretty often a limiting factor until late game, especially around levels where new abilities become available.

My latest playthrough was by far the most fun, running a double Lone Wolf setup in Tactician Mode, which is where it's at for difficulty. Fights frequently have extra curveballs to them which spiced things up nicely (one enemy having evasion aura for instance). Lone Wolf is the way to go for me now as well. The convenience of only having to manage 2 characters is great, but I do wish there were double civil points as well.

Overall I found EE more enjoyable on the whole, and it's worth mentioning the game also runs WAY better now than it did in base. I remember the oil rig fight bringing my PC to its knees previously, but I had barely a frame drop this time around. Some of the encounters were begging to be slathered with the cheesiest of cheeses and I would have certainly failed honor mode at one point, but as I said, it's still one of the best RPGs I've played next to Witcher 3. Very absorbing, I'd give it a solid 9/10 at least.

If any beginners do happen to stumble onto this review: I do recommend starting with Classic difficulty. Anything lower than that is too easy and will get boring if you want any sort of challenge, and Tactician will be too brutal for a first playthrough, until you at least know how to counter certain things.

I don't recommend this game in it's current form, even though it is early access. The servers are extremely low quality and the developers have announced that they have to rebuild a large portion of the core game code in order to stop the horrendous desync and other player lag. Being shot and killed seconds after taking cover is unfortunately a normality in this game (think early Battlefield 3 style, only much worse).

As for gameplay, this is absolutely NOT H1Z1. The gunplay is far better, and the overall feel is aimed towards a realistic approach. It's essentially a game of who spots who first in a lot of cases, and unfortunately again with the desync, sometimes even that's not good enough. Gunfights are largely a coin toss to see who's hits register first, if at all.

The good news is that the developers are very attentive to problems and are quickly working on improving the game and adding new features along the way.

I will update this once the desync issues are fixed and the game is in a much better state. If the majority of the desync can be eliminated and the server quality improved, this will be a really great battle royale. It's popularity has already gotten Daybreak to move their butts and actually work on fixing H1Z1 and communicating with their playerbase, which is tremendous as well.

Edit - Love the downvotes for honesty and transparency, keep 'em coming. Broken game is broken, don't believe the hype folks.

Edit - 6/25/17 - Performance on the GPU side has increased tremendously, which is to be congratulated. Hit reg, especially melee, is still a massive issue, whereas desync doesn't seem to be as bad as it was. Unfortunately, I've also come across my first definite cheater, though I suppose that's to be expected with the massive increase in popularity lately. Unfortunate really, ruined an otherwise okay run.

Edit - 4/14/18 - Recently revisited PUBG with a friend, and I have to say the optimization is currently feeling really great. My i7-2600K/GTX 980 system didn't have a single complaint in the frame department. The new map is also pretty cool, and the updated UI is clean and minimally intrusive, which I always approve of. I can't speak on network stability since we only managed to squeak in about 3 very quick rounds. I understand there is much to be desired in the area of destructable objects (fences, window bars, etc), which is unfortunate. Once I manage to get a few good rounds in, I'll update again.

Edit - 4/17/18 - Having played a few more rounds, I have to say I still really haven't had a good chance to shoot at anyone. The game continues to be one of whoever-spots-the-other-first generally wins the exchange. One major complaint I have is that at one point I ended shooting at a duo with my duo partner, he ended up getting dropped and we got flanked by another team. I peeked into a guy around a shack and fired about 5 rounds directly into his face, and I died. My teammate in spectator reports that I fired once at best. I'm not sure if this continues to be due to the abysmal tick rate the game runs at, or if desync/lag is still a major issue, but I was pretty disappointed. I'm still looking to get a couple solid rounds in where I'm able to fire at people multiple times in the round before I commit to an updated score.

Yep, Prey is a conglomerate of many previously used ideas, but it's executed pretty well. Technically, the game runs really well, but there are a few bugs here and there, namely certain advanced video settings not sticking after restart and some objects not stacking properly.

The only real problems I have with the game so far are craftable Neuromods and the chipset for discovering hidden Mimics with the Psychoscope. Both almost feel like cheating. Not using the chipset, on the other hand, feels like gimping yourself slightly. I don't think I would have put it in the game, or at least put it further on, as it completely nullifies Mimics as a threat.

The only other negative, a minor one, is the pretty bad enemy AI. I have 0 points in any type of stealth, and it's as easy as rounding a couple corners to evade most enemies.

Regardless, there are a multitude of ways to play the game so some replayability is certain. The atmosphere is also pretty terrific, with distant howls and clangs, especially outside the station while space walking. Or space flying, rather.

As for whether it's worth $60, well, we'll see how long it takes me to get to the conclusion. I don't really get how people are claiming it's a 5-10 hour game, unless you're playing on Easy and mindlessly shotgunning everything you come across the entire game while also skipping side quests.

I will update this review once I've finished the game.

What a fantastic game, truly. I haven't been this addicted to a game since Witcher 3 first came out. Early on, around level 3-5 the game was a bit tough, learning about the various status effects and combat (pro tip: when you want to attack, hold the attack button, default control, to reduce misclick chances), but at level 12 I'm cruising pretty easily through.

The gameplay is sometimes a bit weird. My favorite so far is combat with 3 ice elementals when one repeatedly hits my support enchanter from a solid 5 ap move away, eventually killing him because I thought he was hitting the tank directly in front of him. Silly me.

The default UI seemingly has no way of opening bags during sales/purchasing at vendors which is really unfortunate. The bags themselves are super useful. I like putting my arrows in one, which I then drag to my spell bar for easy arrow access.

The spell effects are really cool, and the variety in classes and game length ensures great replayability. I haven't had a chance to play co-op just yet, something I'm hoping to do soon. Can't wait to troll with static cloud arrows.

The music is also pretty cool overall, very catchy and again a good variety. I usually leave music off but I don't mind it in this game.

If you can get through the first few hours of learning the UI, map, combat etc, then you'll be rewarded with a great RPG experience (pro tip 2: the default builds are usually pretty bad. Also, dagger rogues are pretty bad early on).

Edit - 85 hours update. The honeymoon is definitely over, and several consistent annoyances have made themselves apparent. Misclicks due to shifting character models are the least of it. Some abilities, such as Elemental Tortoise or Ranged Precision Aura, sometimes show their activation animations but don't actually activate. Naturally they go on cooldown as well, so you can look forward to 2 rounds without them. I didn't notice anything in the gameplay that would suggest a reason for this (enemy aura blockers, for example).

Autosaves are too uncommon, usually only happening before large or important fights. DO NOT FORGET TO SAVE FREQUENTLY. This completely ruined a co-op game with a friend, after we got focused and neglected to save, then had to go back about 1.5 hours and at least 1 level up worth of playtime. All motivation to play this game died that night.

Speaking of having to load saves, I don't understand why when both main characters die, you are forced to load a save rather than use those handy res scrolls on your followers.

There are probably a few more that time away from the game has caused me to forget, but at best I'd currently rate this game about a 7/10, and now I'll be very carefully investigating Divinity 2 before I make the plunge.

Not since Rallysport Challenge 2 have I enjoyed a rally game so much. Dirt 3 didn't quite do it for me, but then again I didn't really give it a shot either.

There's plenty to do here including many rally courses and championships, rallycross and hill climb, as well as a plethora of classic and modern cars to choose from.

The excellent visuals combined with the great sense of speed are what sell this game for me (not only good visuals, the game runs fantastic too). You can get away with the default vehicle setup in most cases, but there's also a ton of in-depth settings to tune your car to exactly how you need it for the experienced users.

I haven't experienced Racenet or anything it offers yet due to the crash around Christmas time, but from what I understand, there are challenges put out to the community, so that should be interesting as well. The only real negative so far is that only rallycross supports pvp racing. I would have liked to go head to head on rally courses as well.

I'll definitely be putting more hours into the game and recommend it to anyone who enjoys rally racing games.

Edit - tip for new users: I recommend you set your co-driver to give info "earlier" than default, as when you get going fast, he gives commands as you are already into the turns and cautions, which sometimes leads to a crash.

Ori & The Blind Forest convinced me that side-on platformers are a-okay, so I decided to give this one a try when the trilogy went on sale (great deal too). Like with Ori, I'm pleasantly surprised. It's a very gorgeous physics based game, with short but interesting levels with frequent checkpoints that you can jump into if you only want to play a few minutes at a time.

Combat is very basic but feels solid, similar to how you can "feel" the impact of the weapons hitting enemies in the Souls games.

The only major two gripes I have so far are sometimes wonky physics, which happens with engines like these, and truly horrid hitboxes on some traps, especially the spiked balls on chains. I've been hit by more than one from several character widths away.

Overall though if you enjoy platforming games, give this one a shot.