Recent reviews by ACPaco

I can't remember the last time I laughed so much at a videogame from start to finish. The runtime is short but the segments of worlds to explore are relatively large, with more and more paths opening as you form your team. There's only four talking guns but they're all multifunctional and each a great character. The bounties are all fun characters, too, some of them having way too little to say but they are voiced by A-list talent so they got what they could afford. There are tons of hidden collectibles and the threadbare economy sort of forces you to find as many as you can to buy upgrades, which seamlessly pads out the time between the bounties. Meanwhile the original soundtrack by Tobacco is fantastic; chill while exploring and more upbeat noise whenever combat erupts. The gunplay is the real star, though. On Normal difficulty I died an awful lot until I realized you have to keep moving, jumping and switching up your attacks like the Slayer in Doom Eternal, which I was not expecting from the goofy comedy game about aliens getting high on humans. If you were a fan of Channel 101 back in the day you are going to love every stupid moment.

I was given “Cyberpunk 2077” as a gift and felt compelled to see it through to the end. Otherwise I probably would have submitted for a refund, because when this game first came out I felt like I beat it in spite of itself.

The technical mess CDPR originally shipped was an absolute nightmare to play. There were moments, few and far between but still there, where I actually got into the gameplay and started to enjoy the aimless drifting that I envisioned most of the game would be. Just wandering around from one side job to another, meeting weirdos and doing random jobs, I mean what kind of a punk cares about plot? Then the game would shove the plot in my face, again and again, and keep reminding me I was on a non-existent “ticking clock” that apparently only ticks at your pace of going through specific story beats. Then the game itself would break in some stupendous fashion and I was right back out of it.

After a while it just wore me down to the point that I just mainlined the story until it was over. It wasn’t bad, some of it was borderline great, which made the context of the actual game all the more frustrating. With another year or two of development time this really could have been excellent. I doubted future patches would ultimately make Night City ever worth visiting again, but lo and behold almost a year later they actually did it!

In addition to the “Edgerunners” update that added a bunch of quality of life improvements, bug fixes and some new content, I also upgraded my system with an RTX card capable of running raytracing and DLSS. All of the technical issues that heavily marred my first playthrough have been resolved. With maxed out graphics running at a smooth 60 FPS and the quests, NPCs and traffic actually working (for the most part - traffic can still get stuck for no apparent reason but not constantly like it used to) I was able to get into the groove of the game and stick with it for over 150 hours.

Without crashes, sudden framerate drops and broken scripting, Night City is incredibly immersive. The writing can be really excellent, the depth of the world building incredible, but of course this is the same team that adapted the “Witcher” working with another pre-established IP. Despite that ticking clock of the plot, you actually have the freedom to spend as long as you like doing whatever you want almost from the very beginning. I cruised from one random gig to the next, leveling up and maxing out my character long before I hit the midpoint of the main story. I found all of Johnny Silverhand’s junk and completed all the side stories. By the end I was already plotting out my next playthrough. I managed to see all of the endings, including the secret ones, except apparently one I messed up by not saving one NPC halfway through the campaign that there’s no obvious indication you can save. Whatever, I’ll get him the next time.

This game went from my “Hot Garbage” pile to being one of my favorites thanks to patches and a new graphics card. The Edgerunners DLC is basically just marketing for the Netflix anime but the technical fixes are what really salvaged it. Can’t wait for the “Phantom Liberty” expansion to bring me back again next year.

I was playing this thing on launch day when it was at its worst and still managed to stick with it. The “Wastelanders” update and content drops since have patched over the most glaring issues and really fleshed out the world. New features, quality of life improvements and questlines are added regularly. If you actually liked the Survival Mode and settlement building in “Fallout 4” but wished you could show off your homebase to real-life friends, not just NPC companions, and then go off for some co-op adventures, then this is the game for you.

West Virginia is vast and diverse, the main story going for dozens of hours, not including the newest content. The card-based S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system takes a little getting used to but turns out to be the most lenient and forgiving of the series, with the ability to swap out perks on the fly. A future update includes custom loadouts that will even let you swap your skill points around. If you like crafting and base-building you will get into an exploration/scavenging cycle that’s never ending. When you get bored of that there are always at least one or two special events popping off with seasonal events thrown in on a rotation. Then there’s the seasons themselves that shower you with loot for daily and weekly challenges. There is never nothing to do in this game.

The sheer size of the world pushes the Creation Engine to its limits. Transitioning between certain dense areas will bring your framerate to a screeching halt no matter what your settings are, even on a high-end system with a SSD. While it was heavily criticized for being empty and hollow on release, ‘76 was actually brimming over with content in the form of text logs and holotapes, all of which were in need of some extensive editing. Computers with a single page of lore will always spill over into three or more, holotapes can go on for what feels like an eternity giving you the complete backstory of some corpse you stumbled upon that means absolutely nil to the plot. Now in addition we have NPCs that have repopulated most of the wasteland. Some are incredibly fun to interact with, others feel like they just drone at you forever. While there’s a ton of repeatable content, story missions are singular events that you can only complete once per character, with choices that will have lasting consequences on how the factions and others will react to you. At this point you need at least two characters to see everything on offer because some choices will wall off others.

Why anyone would pay for a private server is beyond me. “Fallout 76” is best experienced with friends (and strangers), especially your first time through, but it works just as well as a single-player game from beginning to end for a truly hardcore experience. Griefing is rare, most times you see strangers they just wave at you and sometimes want to trade. When a major event is going off and most of the server gets together to co-op some boss monsters it’s always a blast and usually worth it, until your game client crashes but hey, that’s always the gamble you take playing this one.

Like “Fallout 4” and “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” before it, if you are a sucker for the Bethesda game loop, you’ll somehow find a way to forgive all the bugs and jank and soldier on because despite everything about it, “Fallout 76” just scratches that open-world survival itch and keeps you coming back for more even when you know it’s against your best interests. I hope those “years and years” of support “until the sun burns out” are for real, Todd.

I want to recommend this game. It's writing, voice acting and art direction go a long way and kept me going through to the finish. Unfortunately the game itself is a poor man's GTA. The gameplay is shallow and repetitive, the world often feels dead and the AI is atrocious. There's no fun side activities or any real comic relief. Also the technical bugs are an absolute nightmare factory, especially if you equip the "Classico" trenchcoat and go into cover. An excellent story wasted on mediocrity.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game while it was still in early access, tracking down new story elements as they were being added. The final polish on the full release was well worth the wait! It took me three tries to get through a hardcore run but man was it satisfying in the end. I wish I could go back and experience it completely fresh. One of the best survival games available!

This a crap cash grab, nothing to do with Metal Gear, feels like a knock-off of Tom Clancy's The Division and plays like a cut Call of Duty multiplayer mode.

The best Fallout, best open-world RPG, best shooter, base builder, loot raider, whatever aspect it was they nailed it. As an IRL Commonwealth citizen it appealed to me in a very personal way. Beat the game on normal in ~200 hours, then completed with 100% achievements (including all DLC) on a survival run clocking another 250+ hours. About a year later I returned for a survival master run sticking to melee weapons and poor choices. A fourth time around in Fallout 4 VR in on my future agenda!

Every heist's a new adventure no matter how many times you play, you never know what's going to ♥♥♥♥ up.

If you have any nostalgia for the original Painkiller you are going to hate this 4-hour abortion. It could have just been an HD remake and that would have been awesome. Instead they slapped on this bizarre new story and crowbarred in cutscenes that made me cringe. The worst tried to halfheartedly humanize the demon hordes you're almost constantly mowing down by showing them going about mundane routines, like a witch pushing a recycling cart and a Nazi corpse and BDSM gimp hugging it out on a park bench, just before you show up and apparently RUIN EVERYTHING! Game balance and flow is messed up by a dumb mechanic in which If you don't collect killed enemies' souls fast enough, they turn into skeletons that are harder to kill than the original enemies they came from. The Tarot cards are worthless. Levels from the original were reworked liberally, sometimes in awful directions. Some of the best like the WW2-themed one and pretty much the whole final act, including that amazing boss fight in Hell, have vanished and been replaced with hot garbage. As a final insult, the ending cutscene actually gives a nod to probably the worst of the sequels. ♥♥♥♥ this game.

Fun gameplay, great use of retro graphics but way too short and not enough of a challenge by the end. The levels aren't nearly hard enough to warrant a skip option in the menu, even if it was limited. The level design could have incorporated more variety based on the gadget upgrades. None of them felt like they had more than a couple of ways to beat them. I hope there are official expansions in the future beyond community maps. Still, it is really fun for about 3 hours.