Recent reviews by iToaster

As a complete D&D newbie, I was dragged into this by my veteran D&D player girlfriend practically kicking and screaming. Top down CRPGs have never appealed to me; the closest I ever got to playing something like this was perhaps Skyrim or Witcher 3, both of which are very different games in their presentation.

I'm a fan now. A BIG fan.

Every aspect of this game screams devotion and care. The art style and overall graphical presentation, the flow of exploration and combat, the music, and the sound design - dear GOD the sound design is on point. Every little action has details and sounds that fit perfectly and add that extra 'oomph' to whatever you're doing.

The story is also magnificent and far more replayable than I was prepared to give it credit for prior to playing it a second time. There's a huge amount of room for things to change based on the decisions you make, and you're never locked out of trying something stupid - that's the beauty of the dice roll as opposed to the hard skill checks present in other games. You can always give it a shot even if it's not exactly something you're good at.

At any point during the game, you're free to respec both your main character and your companions, not just within their respective classes but switching to an entirely different one or multiclassing if desired. I absolutely love this approach - if you've got similar worries to me that it removes some of the penalty of 'live with your choices', it absolutely does not and is a very welcome addition that encourages experimentation and trying something new.

Combat is seriously a joy - and as you learn the fundamentals of how it works, you can find new ways to approach every situation. This isn't a game that ruins your experience replaying with meta knowledge (although I would highly advise avoiding spoilers on the internet); rather, it allows you to go in armed with the ability to go about the whole situation differently. Sometimes, there's a way to defeat a group of enemies or a boss that you may never have thought about - the game presents every battlefield in a specific way, but very rarely actually restricts you to the confines of that specific combat zone and the items within it. Bring in some smokepowder barrels, sneak in from the back, throw furniture from a ledge - or just throw the enemies out of the area that plays to their strengths entirely and fight on your own terms.

There are also an impressive number of fights you can talk your way out of, or situations you can talk your way into. Whether or not you want to do so is entirely up to you, but unlike other games where speech-based skills are largely just for trader prices and occasional persuasion checks, this game allows you to talk your way into just about everything. The game makes extensive use of dialogue options to worm your way into getting what. One example relatively early on is the ability to talk an enemy leader into walking away from their guards and into a private room to talk one-on-one with you, at which point you can much more easily kill them without anyone else even so much as noticing.

I could go on for ages - the point is, this is an incredibly well put together game that deserves your time and money if you have even the slightest interest in story-based RPGs or D&D. Take it from someone who literally never played something like this before in my life - I'm sold and doing my own solo playthrough, currently on act 3, after my girlfriend and I finished our initial co-op run. She's been doing an Honour Mode (one save, max difficulty) run that she finally got well into act 3 herself. Give this one a shot - you won't regret it.

Also, if you make sandcastles with a cleric, you have immaculate taste. It's a fact.

"There's potential".

There. Yet another game where that's the only thing that can really be said about it. You don't have to read the rest of this; you already know what that means if you've played other games like that.

Another game lumped into the sea of unfinished early access titles on Steam as having potential that's not realized, so the game is only fun in the same sense a tech demo is cool to look at - even though it's marketed as a finished and full release. Are there improvements from the first game? Sure. But there's just as many, if not far more, steps backwards. Even worse, the defining aspect of the first game to me and what truly separated it from being a mere SimCity clone - individual person simulation, being able to follow people around - is completely broken if you actually try to pay attention to it due to insane issues with traffic and mass transit that should never have existed at launch, let alone several months later. It's also missing many of the small details that were present in the first game, likely in an effort to scale up the simulation at the expense of it actually being interesting to watch.

Don't expect fixes soon. In their own PR Stunt of the Week blogs, they said bugfixes and patches aren't worth their own updates right now and they'd rather simply include them with other features and DLC down the road - potentially several more months down the road.

I've seen an argument that some of the things people want from C:S 2 weren't in C:S 1 until about 2 years after launch, so fine - come back 2 years from now and see if this game is any better. Until then, trust me, you're better off sticking with the first game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a fantastic flight simulation & game with surprisingly good optimization despite its incredible visuals, even on systems that barely meet recommended requirements - noted as my grandfather, who used to be a pilot, plays this off a 12 year old dell business desktop on a spinning platter hard disk drive, where the only upgraded component is its used GTX 970 GPU (bought explicitly as that is the 'recommended specs' GPU for this game). The support is phenomenal, and despite the game's large size requirements, the decision to allow updates to be individually cherry-picked so you can improve the areas you fly most often - saving disk space wherever possible - is fantastic. I would love to see features like this in other large games.
Flight models have been regularly improved for aircraft based on community feedback over the years when Asobo & Microsoft realized how much of a hardcore fanbase MSFS brought in compared to the casual audience, and the amount of free content provided to the game is outstanding even if you don't purchase the deluxe / premium deluxe versions. Asobo has worked with multiple major third-party addon creators to bring high-quality updates to the aircraft as well as entirely new planes, such as the free study-level A310, upcoming update to the A320, updates to the Garmin navigation systems to make them true-to-life, flight models and system quirks of aircraft including the Cessna Citation series aircraft, etc. Speaking both for myself and my grandfather, as both of us have been regular MSFS users since Flight Simulator 95, this is by far the best the series has ever been.

HOWEVER. The biggest drawback, and perhaps only truly major drawback to this game, is the launcher. The MSFS launcher is incredibly resource-heavy, eating up your CPU and GPU while open - and the launcher is the only method to download and update the game. You are only downloading the launcher when you purchase and install this product.
The launcher is not fast at downloading either, capping out well below whatever your maximum download speed is. For those of you with download speeds in the gigabyte+ range, this is probably not an issue you'll notice or care about - but for anyone with slower, cheaper urban internet plans or rural internet connections, you will be stuck on that launcher for a very long time when installing or updating the game. All of this counts towards your game time as well, meaning you will lose the ability to refund the game just by installing it as you'll far surpass the 2 hour mark. The download is also prone to freezing and erroring out during peak download times, such as directly following a major content update - and fixing this often requires manual intervention and more headaches.

Essentially, you need to know this is a product you will enjoy BEFORE purchasing it if you know your internet will push you past the refund window. If you're a casual fan looking to get into flying, then you can't start in a better place than here - but just make sure you've done some research and know you won't want to refund it before jumping in.

OpenTTD - and, I suppose by extension, Transport Tycoon from '95 - has this odd charm to it that nothing has ever successfully replicated since. Not to say there aren't a lot of awesome modern takes on games like this, with Transport Fever first and foremost coming to mind, but just give this one a shot if you like the idea of laid back transport company management. Very model railroad-esque in a way, fun to watch your creations go about their routes.

Personally I've gotten at least several hundred hours out of OpenTTD, just not on the steam version - so pardon the relatively low hour count here if you're questioning how much time you'll get out of it. You can and will be able to get practically endless enjoyment out of this game, and either way it's free, takes up just a few megabytes of storage, and could (probably) literally run on a smart fridge - so just download it and find out.

This feels like a cash-in. I had a long list prepared of the good and bad points, but ultimately this feels unbelievably generic, like it was made by a much smaller and less capable studio than Payday 2's extraordinary size and success would imply. I'm reminded more of knock-off indie titles that fail to capture the feel of what they're knocking off. The shockingly low production value of the game, even when it DOES work through the utterly broken servers, is inexcusable as a $40 successor to the wildly successful Payday 2.

Give this some time. Some serious, serious time. There's potential here, but how many times have you heard 'there's potential' in the past when people talk about games that inevitably get abandoned with some boring corporate excuses for low sales? I await the generic font text wall image on social media talking about how they apologize and plan to improve the game after a shoddy launch that 'failed our fans' or something.


Broke d*** piece of sh** servers!

This game has the depth No Man's Sky desperately needs, but No Man's Sky has the seamless engine this game desperately needs.

Man, imagine a world where the two worked together.

It's a Bethesda RPG. Expect the same quirks you've seen from them since Oblivion, but now with space as the backdrop. In my opinion, a return to form for the studio after Fallout 4 simplified the RPG experience and Fallout 76 trampled on it. You'll see elements of both the Fallout series and Elder Scrolls series and the usual 'amazing side stories, alright main story' you've likely come to anticipate. Companions have a ton more depth than Skyrim, more akin to Fallout 4 - but if you're hot off of Baldurs Gate 3 like I am, don't expect that level of detail.

Lastly, this game will run like absolute dogmeat if you're still holding out on an older GPU like I was. Mods and guides will help it to run better, but I would be very cautious going in - my GTX 1080 was struggling even with FSR boosted way up and the settings turned way down. That being said, it's been a relatively bug-free experience - in 36 hours i've encountered one crash at an inconsequential point in the game, no soft/hardlocks whatsoever, and a couple of Creation Engine NPC pathfinding moments. Overall, this is the most stable a Bethesda game has ever been at launch and I have no doubt it will become more stable with updates.

Valheim is deserving of every bit of praise it has gotten. You will find some areas that feel perhaps a little emptier than they should, or outright missing content in the late game due to its early access nature; but this in no way stops it from already being an incredible title even before considering this potential, bearing a strong gameplay resemblence to Terraria with a bit of the Elder Scrolls series mixed in for good measure. If you're a fan of something slower, more methodical, and absolutely brimming with future nostalgia in every aspect of its visual and audio design, then you owe it to yourself to give Valheim a try.

Initial impressions, 12.5 hours in having never played any previous X games nor watched any youtube tutorials / guides (I have looked up forum / wiki stuff and used the in-game encyclopedia, however):

If you're burned by the relatively shallow and inconsequential feel of a game like Elite: Dangerous where a lot of spectacle happens, but it ultimately is just smoke and mirrors to represent a low-level background simulation on a server somewhere, then this game will have you covered. The knowledge that every ship, station, outpost, satellite, and turret belongs to someone and serves a purpose is unbelievably cool in an era of false light shows, and it's super cool to watch factions building new equipment and economies shift around sometimes in part to your own actions. Ship handling is noticeably more arcade-like than Elite or Star Citizen, but not as much as something like No Man's Sky, so you're still engaged with the flight aspect when travelling around and have full 6DOF freedom, including toggle-able flight assists and such. (noted that I made the potentially stupid decision to entirely spend my initial hours in the 6.00 beta branch which sports a new physics rework supposedly, so take that how you will - but it's worth noting that it looks absolutely fantastic both in screenshots and in motion with it too!)

Ship scale is incredible. While you can't walk every hallway and deck of your ship like you can in Star Citizen, you at least have a little bit of immersion walking into transporters and heading to your cockpit - an improvement over something like Elite. There are four ship classes, all of them flyable - small, medium, large, and XL, and a medium frigate is big enough to have a landing pad that can hold not a tiny fighter bay like Elite, but an entire small ship. It really is a shame that this game is singleplayer only as getting in the cockpit of your first larger ship with multiple crew seats and built-in ship storage really makes you want to bring your friends aboard for the experience.

But the real meat more than anything seems to be the ability to build up an entire empire of your own. You hire pilots and crew to man your ships, training them and ordering them around on the map, and you can construct and manage your own stations and large-scale fleets. Everything requires real, in-game resources to be collected, manufactured, and delivered, so in addition to your standard credit cost of ships and modules, the materials must be present to produce them as well - this very early on shows the player how important having your own fleet is when you get held up waiting for ship upgrades so you can help expedite the economy a little. There are several factions even in the base game, and you can do missions for each and gain reputation to unlock better ships, modules, blueprints, and other benefits. And of course there's the token 'eat everything' enemy faction in the form of the Xenon, taking a similar albeit much more prominent and destructive role from something like Elite's Thargoids.

In essence, having played a wide variety of other games, I'd most closely relate this to a combination of Mount & Blade's empire building and Elite Dangerous's style, albeit lacking the incredible UI work done by the latter - as others have noted, the user interface is a mess and you will find yourself looking up how to do what you'd imagine are basic functions. Do NOT skip the tutorial as it is a vital part of figuring it out. I've also noticed a few pathfinding bugs that take a while for the AI to figure out, whether that be from your current ship's autopilot, your pilots trying to go through a solid wall to dock, or NPC ships getting stuck at a jump gate - though they have thus far all figured it out eventually, so be prepared to be patient.

It does however have very good sound design and an incredible soundtrack that's somewhat similar in style to Stellaris.

Admittedly, 12.5 hours in this is nothing. I can see that from where I am in the game now - every playthrough is going to be RPG-length, easily. But my god, if you've been on the fence about this and you come with experience from other space games wanting some real depth for a change, do not hesitate. This will be worth your while.

Highly recommended to any 40k and/or action game fans, when it's on steep sale only. The decision to repackage this game as a $60 'anniversary edition' is idiotic for something this old, especially considering the included DLC is entirely focused around PvP multiplayer - which is dead (with the exception of a single co-op PvE dlc with a chaos mission, which to be fair is quite fun.).

Nevertheless, Space Marine is a horde chop-chop game with excellent shooting mechanics and even greater melee mechanics, allowing you to use a wide range of both ranged and melee weapons throughout the campaign to satisfy your inner desire to purge xenos. Unlike the many 40k strategy games floating around which must be balanced in ways that allow space marines to actually die now and then, here you are a space marine who can and will mow through massive mobs of enemies as if you were just mowing the lawn. The game uses a recharging shield and non-recharging health system, with health recharging the same way as more recent Doom games - by getting brutal finishing moves on stunned enemies. Despite its' appearance as a third person gears-of-war like shooter, there is no cover mechanic and you are encouraged to charge the enemy with your chainsword more often than not as opposed to taking distant pot shots. Being a Relic Entertainment game, the same company that made the Dawn of War series, you'll also see a similar art style throughout the game that you may already be used to - which I consider a plus.

TL;DR: Lore accurate space marine defends Forge World from ork Waagh.

While it abandons some of the open free-form nature of the original Stanley Parable in favor of a considerably more linear approach, that doesn't make this game any less outstanding of an experience to play through in its own way. It also contains all the content from the original Stanley Parable (albeit a small amount of it having been changed), so this is a good starting point for anyone who missed out before.

I highly recommend this to literally everyone - this is an experience you want to play for yourself, not watch on YouTube.