Recent reviews by Fraggel vonHelldiddler

We need more starwars games. That is a simple fact. Sadly it seems that someone who is in control always manages to mess them up pretty badly. And I cannot for the life of me figure out why they do this over, and over, and over again. It is almost like someone's ego gets in the way.

Anyways, TFU (this game) has a good core. But controls make it less than enjoyable. Yes, the menu's on this port is horrendous. But that wont stop an otherwise good game. Which is something this game is not.

The costumes are great. Some of the best designs I have seen in a star-wars game period. They have a purple lightsaber in the base game, which is all I need. And the combat has a core of a good energetic melee/magic system.

Sadly. The game suffer from consolitis through a dedicated lock-on key which is useless until you need it to progress. The camera rarely stay more than 5 minutes under the player's control. In fact, it will auto-center more than Witcher 3 horseriding. And forced camera-angles during bossfight will see you get attacked from off-screen over, and over, and over again.

More than that though, the block is useless even when the game expects you to use it. There is a wierd lagg and a random twitch, that makes the block not only unreliable, but effectively broken. It also roots you in place, which is mindblowingly counter-intuitive to the game by and large.

The game also features pointless repetetive quick-time events. Which, granted, are always pointless and repetetive. But failing them means nothing, since you just restart the sequence...

Finally, the game features ALOT of CC. Which is always a bad design, no matter how prevalent it is as a design-choice. CC was bad design in 1998, it is bad design in 2018. I know that this game was not released in 2018, but the CC fetish is still prevalent.


Even though game-developers have not listened to me for the 2 decades I have been trying to point out these things, I still feel criticism requires a constructive part as well.

1. Quick-time.
Replace quick-time with execution. The player chooses which execution to use, for cool factor, and it is a tactical choice. Will the player be able to execute this enemy without taking more damage than they gain from the kill? That sort of thing. You get the cool semi-cutscenes WITHOUT sacrificing actual game-play to do it.

2. Make block an everpresent mechanic. Blocking is required to avoid getting hit by blaster-fire. And if manage to time a saber-swing correctly, the bolt will go where you are aiming.

3. Camera should ALWAYS be 100% controlled by the player, cutscenes and aforementioned executions being the exception.

4. Never ever auto-center the camera, see nr 3.

5. Make sure input lag is not in your game.

tl;dr : Like skyrim, minus some stuff. However, each feature present in Elex is better than the implementation of said feature in Skyrim. Sadly none of them lives up to an open world which lives and breaths without us. If I had to chose between Skyrim and Elex, I would chose Elex even if the modding community is taken into account. Same comparison between Fallout 4 and Elex just reinforces my choice by a large margin.

Elaboration.
Elex reads like the list of priorities that I have in my head, that I assume all long time gamers have. There are no new ground being broken in Elex, but what it does, it does better than any other open world. Except witcher 3 ofcourse. As you would expect, it loses to W3 in all respects but one. Oddly enough I feel like Elex has more role-playing than W3.
It is as if Pirana Bytes have ghosted my forum-posts and structured their list of priorities according to my arguments from the past two decades. And it seems to me that I was right, but not everyone might agree.

There is one more aspect where Elex does slightly better than Witcher 3. The central campaign is better structured from an open-world/sandbox narrative.

You are Jax. A drugfueled demigod and Cleric-of-Tetragrammaton-wannabe. After a suspicious rocket took down your ship and suspiciously a trio of your clansmen where waiting there to deliver the punishment for failure, it is all so suspicious, you find yourself detoxed and without clothes. Basically Elex tells the story of a cocain-addict who wakes up in the proverbial Mexican alley with the proverbial hangover. From there you will traverse the post-apocalyptic land of Elex and discover 3 distinct civilizations at the same time as you explore within and discover these things called feelings.

If you want a reasonable comparison then Elex is much like bethesda, but without all the bugs. And in 3rd person. The only aspect in which it loses to Skyrim or Fallout is in the sounds department... and the "all decorations are maniplulable items" that is actually an essential reason that I keep buying bethesda games in the hopes that they fix all their other ♥♥♥♥.

I love this game because it did what Fallout 4 failed to do. It fixed many of my issues with Skyrim. Perhaps you will too, if you give it time.

In short: No FOV slider... again!

The longer explanation is that FOV is hard-coded and outside player control. It changes depending on exploration, holding a weapon, sneaking, running, and so on. Ie, FOV is outside player control.

And! I! Dont! Like! That!

In addition to the loss of player-control, the 'toon is positioned so that the centerpoint of the screen is where is head is. The question becomes a simple "why!". All this leads to is make a large portion of the screen blocked, leaving only the upper 1/3 open to view the scenery. I dont get this setup. They had the same idiocy in Shadow of Mordor, and it had to be fixed by activating cheat-engine with associated graphical issues.

I cannot fathom the reason behind this issue. As stated, shadow of mordor had it. Mass effect Andromeda has it. The witcher 3 has it. Almost all games that have mods released to it has a camera mod that returns control to the player. Skyrim had a mod that also stopped the annoying as hell "cinematic kill-cam" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Why is this even a thing?! All it serves to do is show off the frekkin boots of the 'toon.

It is like the guy designing the boots on modern games, is actually the son of some sith-like shadow-ceasar, so now games have to show off these boots or other devs will die to a bond-like crotch lazer for daring to hide the amazing foot-wear modelling.

FOV sliders are always requested in all games. But not all gamers require them to play. I know that I am in the minority that simply have had enough of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. But that does not change my inability to play a game that makes me feel like I am trying to look over the shoulder of that impossible large dude on a concert.

I seriously dont understand why they cannot include it in the options. The engine allows it. The cheat-engine FOV fix proves this in all games that dont include them (the entire Mass Effect series of games, SoM, SoW, etc).

In the 90's and early 00's it was standard and mandatory for all games on PC. But since the "new game experience" has settled with console-first development. It is as if player control and customization is too much to ask. If any developer actually cares enough to read this rant, then understand the following:

1. Allow FOV sliders for all instances where you "design" FOV changes.
2. Allow for camera horizontal and vertical positioning for all "design" position changes.

That is it. In many engines this is actually just a check-box that needs to be clicked once before compiling. Yet that seems to be too much.

Yea yea, I know, having a FOV of 90 instead of 60 requires more computing power. But seriously, I am a PC player, not a console-pleb. Get this into your sculls!

Graphics review: Who knows, the frickin dude blocked it all.
Story review: Dont care, FOV sucks.
Controls review: See above.

It looks good, it has nice controls. And the world is large. But by GOD. We need to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill Ubisoft. Their design is spreading! There is NO exploring the lands when icons fly around the screen. Going to a tower to see more of the world was fun and interesting in the first Assassin's Creed... for about 30% of that game.

The Developers of Mad Max saw that mechanic. Identified what was most booring about it, and made that the center-piece. Now you go to a hot air ballon, and hold down a button. FFS!

They do the core mechanics well. But then they pour on so much annoyances and anti-fun mechanics that this game makes you want to learn programming so you can create a bot to play the game for you. I am loath to give this a negative review, because there is a talented team behind it.

Yes... well. I do not blame the developers of this game for the rating I am forced to give. I blame Ubisoft, and I blame the millions of idiots who give away their money. How could the Mad Max developers look at Ubisoft, and not straight copy them. In the end, a new ferrari is a strong case for producing a by the numbers Assassin's Creed / Far Cry / Watch Dogs clone.

I just wish that religious fanatics would stop killing people, and instead demolish corporate robots.

Deus Ex. Most people are too young to have played the original. Therefore I would like you to youtube Ross's Game Dungeon: Deus Ex. For without it, you will not understand what I personally am reviewing.

Do it before you continue reading my review. You will not be dissapointed.

Now then. This is a story driven corridor shooter in the same vein as, well, most games. From Doom to Mass Effect, this type of game is the quintessential game, ever since real-time 3D games were invented. The Deus Ex series are all of this genre, yet more than the genre. They add a production value and developer toil that few games see. They are the choose your own adventure of Mass Effect, they are the Futuristic version of the Thief series (more so than say Splinter cell), they are what Watch Dogs wish they could be.

A word of warning. This is not an open world game. This game has sky-boxes, it has invisible walls, and it has a rudimentary á posteriori approach to how the player interacts with the game-world. You will restart when you fall off the ledge and into electricity. You will restart when you fail a hack and start the alarm. You will restart so often that save-scumming becomes a pointless term. And yes, you will restart even when you do not die; because you want to try and control the outcome of choices the game gives you.

The dialogue and voice-acting is so good that while the prototypical gamer will apply á posteriori, you can and should apply a á priori method in choice making.

Now that I consider it, I would suggest that you gimp yourself on purpose. Do not use augs that make tasks easier, rather, use augs that give you more freedom. If you do, then you will find that the game is a good FPS-, a good stealth-, and a good choose your own adventure game.

However, the game has faults. And when you sit with a game that has obviously cost a lot of time, passion, and money to make, you will feel baffled about why such easy tasks have not been done properly.

It might seem like small potatoes to the developers and people who do not play a lot of games. But there is mandatory mouse acceleration, which stops reflex aiming so ingraned from FPS play. It has variable mouse sensitivity that makes sniping impossible unless you go around and quick-scope like a 10 year old CoD player. And the game has memory leaks that forces you to only play a few hours at a time. These artifacts of a 3P (piss poor ports) production are down right stupid. No gamer with more than 50 hours total, would want mouse-acceleration, nor variable sensitivity. Aiming with a mouse is based on the very fact that moving the mouse gives a specific rotation of the cross-hair. Youtube CSGO aiming, and you will see how religious people are about these things.

But most of all. The premise of the game is flawed SJW style. The game presents an apartheid style society where people with mechanical limbs and implants are seggregated from the "naturals". There are crude jokes about their lower social status, cops will harras you and extort you. And everywhere there are conversations that dehumanizes augmented people. Yet, they go around calling it racism.

In the previous game, the augmented went crazy and killed people. They are stronger, faster, and more deadly than the naturals. Non-augmented people are actually in their right to curb augmentation, and they are in the right to distance themselves from augmented people in case it happens again. In addition, getting a robotic arm in no way constitutes you as part of a new race. This is the same type of bone-headed missapropriation of words and concepts that a tumbler feminist would love. And that hurts.

If you watched Ross's episode on the original Deus Ex, you know that the game drew its conspiracies from reality. It showed patterns that most people would never know about. It transended gaming, to become a sooth-sayer about our very real future. Hell, it predicted the rise of global terrorism. There is nothing real about the apartheid that Mankind Divided presents. However, while narratively it cannot reach the level of the original Deus Ex. It is still a good game, a great game even.

I do reccomend that you buy this game. It is the opposite of No Man's Sky. It is not philosophy. But it will entertain you. Because it checks more boxes than any other modern game.

I just wish I could shove that stupid beard and pointless techno-sun-glasses inside a helmet so I did not have to be reminded how insanely douch my character looks in conversations.

NoManSky NEXT
This review is mostly aimed at those that played the game on launch.
The Short: The game is better now, still not very good... but better.

The Long: If you are looking for a pure gathering tech-demo. Then this is the game for you. The addition of 3rd person helps ground you in the universe. Shame about the poor implementation of the feature. This summs up the game. Good progress, shame about the implementation.

Gathering is now far deeper, shame that it is still harsh on your finger-ligands; you will be holding down whatever button you have bound to "fire" for hours on end.

The menu's are now deeper, but also un-intuitive and each menu have sub-menu upon sub-menu with different keybinds for each layer of frustration.

The combat is better now, but still poor and clunky.

The graphics are better now, but still rather bland and uninteresting.

And so on...

In the end, this would have been a fine addition to the pre-release promise of Mass Effect Andromeda. But as a stand-alone game, do not buy it unless you, like me, feel the cost is worth it just to check out the tech. As a game, it is very nisch indeed.

OLD REVIEW FOR THE RELEASE VERSION

Yes, the game is repetetive.
Yes, the game is nowhere near as good-looking and immersive as the pre-launch game-play
Yes, Shaun from Hello games promised things that were not delivered.

But. Is No man's sky secretly genious?

I have reached the center of the galaxy, so I know what happens. However, that is not why it is secretly genious. Well, not the MAIN reason of the under-cover savant-status I will try to argue for.

In this game, the goal is just something to aim for. The true game is maintenance of your systems and figuring out how to reach the center as fast as possible. I recently read a review were someone said: Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. Well. Kind of. However, the shallow game is the smoke-screen. In reality it is so wide, and so shallow that it eclipses the very concept of our lives and circles back around to become the most deep game that has ever, and can ever be produced by humans on a transistor based computer system. To understand the game you must consider "what is a game". For the past decade and a half we have moved away from the roots of gaming, from epic classics like populus and qubit. Todays games have hand-holding, constant rewards, and a pat on the back even if you do poorly. Todays game has exposition of how important your actions in the game are. They have action and insane experiences that take the post-real narrative found in movies and turn them up to 11.

Take a game like CS:GO. In reality it is not about skills, it is not about getting ranks. It is about playing, finnishing, and, win or loose, start queing again.

No manssky does away with all that and return to the foundation of what a game is. Sure, the game has a samey-feel to it. Sure, the animations are very stilted and immersion-breaking. Sure, the AI is JUST passing the nightmare found in Alien: Colonian Marines. And yea, sure, whoever coded space-combat and its companion systems; should be shot, quartered, and forced to grow potatoes in Greenland. But, as you play, you realize that were there is need for after-thought and a deft hand in design, nomanssky has you covered.

Different upgrades to your warp-drive allowes you to go from mostly dreary and booring systems, to dreary and booring planets with more grass. At the highest tier you get to go to blue systems, and by then, you will be longing for a grass-less and foilage-less planet. If only as a change of pace. Different colored back-drops indicate what type of resources you are most likely to find in the system space, and perhaps even on the planets. Different systems are not explained to you, you learn them by spending hours in game and slowly seeing patterns.

Industry standards are turned on their head all through the game. As an example:

Money does not matter, since you simply will have no chance to pass the ever rising cost of new ships. Once you finally grind to max itemization, money is used for buying items so you can get back on the road rather than spend hours looking for that one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ resource you are missing to repair your hyper-drive..

Because that is what the game is about. It is about staying on the road.

The end goal does not matter, it is the journey that gives life meaning.

Noamnsky is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ philosophy!

So, awards time. Do I reccomend it to the gamers of today? Hell No. I'd be hardpressed to reccommend this game to ANYONE. Still: Do I think you should all buy it and play it, ♥♥♥♥ yes.

/Noam Chomsky.

<EDIT>
It needs to be said that the marketing of this game was EXTREAMLY misleading. And that is something we need to combat. Through legal means, low sales, and refunds. Sadly, I cannot get a refund because I stand by the words I have written above. The scary thing is that if NMS ends up doing really well economically, then we will see in move towards NMS type marketing. And if we have that, then gaming will die eventually.

Update:

After 67 hours I took a break from AC:Origins. Yesterday I reinstalled the game, and can now not play the Gold Preorder because they cannot "verify ownership". Support "hopes" they can help me.

Ubisoft need to alter their anti-piracy stance and behaviour, or I will pirate their games no matter if I want to play them or not.


Interesting game-concepts, spiteful treatment of customers. Do Not Buy Ubisoft Games! I will post this on all the Ubisoft games I own. They need to restructure their customer appreciation.


Updated Review.

My first review was mostly positive, and that still stands. However, now that I have 1 character in endgame, and one mid level, I have a bit more meat on my bones.

The game is singular, and repetitive even considering the focus of the game. It is a loot-game, and as such most people would play it in whatever way was the most effective way to get that loot. Even knowing that, the game is repetitive. Challenging difficulty in end-game PvE gets repetitive on one enemy alone. Roughly 18 shots (mostly) to the head to take someone down. Every encounter follows the same formula: Get the shotgunners first, then the grenaders, then whatever enemy is closest to being a problem. There are some minor alterations, but that is basically it.

HOWEVER, that is what most games boil down to anyways. Repetition is the essence of any game, be it FPS, RTS, or MMO's. Sure, I would love to see the game turn a leaf, lower the spunge and increase the need to change positions and coordinate attacks (less focus on AoE).

I would love to see a more diverse models for player skins. I would love to see more diverse cast in enemies, and I would love to see more diverse missions. I would love to see some more predictable spray-patterns a la Counter Strike.

In the end, the game has good controls (with some help from AHK), it has fantastic visuals, and it runs better than almost all games release these past 5 years (Witcher 3 being the exception).

I get my fix, which is looting and shooting, repeating missions and getting better at them, playing with randoms and friends-list.

But the biggest selling-point for The Division: There is no other game to contend with it. It is not perfect, it is not even good. But it is the best.

I bought a copy on, or near, release-day some 3 years ago. That first jaunt into the world of Skyrim had me thinking: Being a Scandinavian, I should try to sound like the people in Skyrim. Truly well done on the accent. I also thought: such a big world. And then I thought: Models are better than Oblivin with a small margin.

Then my thoughts started turning to: Why did they design the inventory and combat system like this? So clunky.
Why so few spells?
Why such large swings in difficulty?
Why oh why can't I have my Glass Armor from Morrowind back?

It is all down-hill from there. To list the bad design desicions alone would take up a few to some dozen pages. The bugs are a totally different ball-game, and will not be mentioned. The failure in design is not that they missed an opportunity, for there are many of those as well. No, the failure in design is on a level of 1991. So many of the mistakes they made is gaming-history. Game-play that has been solved already through failed games, arguments on forums and BBS. This should not be rocket science. If you have played computer games for more than 5 years, then you know these pitfalls well enough. So why didn't Bethesda?

Eventually I let the game slip, since the combination of squandered potential and clunky controls just made me wish there was more polish on the game. I say polish, but some of the most irritating aspects of the game is obviously a design-choice. The examples of Spells is an easy one to make, so I will be making it in more detail... I am lazy that way.

Spell-game-play comes down to two major flaws. The only way to cast a spell, aside from racial powers and Dragon born powers, is to first press a button to equip it, hold the corresponding mouse-button, aim, and release. In longer fights this is truly a tedium to behold. Second: Being a pure mage in the game is balls-and-nails hard. No blocking means arrows are your death, in almost every fight. The huge mana-drain that spells take, especially protection-spells, means that you MUST run around and pick flowers to make potions, that you need to use through a clunky interface since you don't have an automatic potion button... I say two major flaws. To be honest, There are atleast 10 major flaws in design alone, in magical game-play alone, in spell-design alone; that is just face-slapping frustrating.


And then the community steps in. Now almost 3 years since release I return for the fourth time to Skyrim. The previous three times I modded as well, but now the game actually stays stable... well semi-stable.

Mod-authors and projects like: STEP (skyrim total enhancement project), Sheson (Skyrim Startup Memory Enhancement), Boris (ENB), ElSopa (ICBINE), Tendo (of SkyRe fame, now Perkus Maximus) and many more to many to name, has turned skyrim from a beutiful game into a Knockout cookie in the looks department. It has a lot less bugs, enhanced combat, added lands, added quests, added music, added items galore, added life. By life I mean the small to the big.

Mods add flying birds, walking birds, immersive patrols, and skirmish war. They name every single person. Add hours upon hours of voiced NPC. Mod-authors and their mods are what makes me return to this game.

All in all: When the game was first released, it was frustrating to play. It was buggy, and growing old in the looks department quickly. However, a community of modders have created some 100 000 mods (maby 20% less than that, it is hard to count that far on your fingers, which is why I might fail on that math), and thanks to them I am no longer frustrated with the game.

Currently playing a Spell-sword that specialize in Sci-fi magics (Electricity and telekinesis), have blue wraith-eyes, and loves to sneak about. In combat I fall back on my trusted sword. By that, I cast a spell and the sword attacks on it's own while I cast electricity spells with such panache that Palpatine would be envious.

If you can stand the loss of time it takes to learn the modding resources. Spend days discussing on the forums, trouble-shoot your mod-list, then you will be rewarded with to date the best game ever made. Play it on a console, and it is just slightly above mediocer.

Addendum: When they release their next open world game, be it fallout or Elderscrolls, I will wait atleast 6 months for the modders to get to know the engine. I will buy the game, but won't touch it simply so I can enjoy it fresh with mods installed. If they fail to support the modding-community, then I will not buy it.

Conclusion: Skyrim cannot stand very well on it's own legs. Thankfully the modding-community has built scaffolds and hammered in some steel in what was a shaky construction at release. If you like RPG games then you will find that Skyrim is Mandatory!

Dubbed a spiritual successor to the Syndicate series (of two games), this is an early access that has potential. However, currently is a rudimentary game that promises fun, but only delivers shooting, cool visuals, and MMO style gathering through "hacking" of ATM's.

Alot of things have to change before I recommend this title, but I do hope that I will soon be able to.

If the tactical options are expanded upon, the game becomes better optimized, and the lvl-designes improve, then yes.

Currently I play this on a 970 windforce g1 gaming edition, and my frames pewter at 24, dropping down to 10-11 after an hour or so of playing. Only spend money if you are prepared to support more than you play.