Recent reviews by Athan Immortal

Weirdly addictive game. Innovative sound system that could change how engine sounds are made in games in future though!

If you're looking for a modern SWAT 4, this is it. Still in development with the odd glitch, but can't fault the dev commitment to the game and even as it is now there's so much content to play.

Played the whole way through the main game and just loved my time with it. I played it on my Steam Deck at high settings and it maintained a solid 40fps the whole time which was nice.

I had been warned to temper expectations for the game since I really enjoyed Deus Ex: Human Revolution back in the day, but honestly the game felt like a worthy successor to me. I absolutely love Adam Jensen as a protagonist and especially after the events at the end of Human Revolution, I didn't think we'd ever see him again.

A nice number of options for approaches, well built levels that offer you alternate routes and reward exploration. Picking up the higher jump ability early on really opened up my options for approaches as well. The game gives you the ability to deal with everyone non-lethal and crucially the ability to move bodies (it's annoying when games make you pick your spot because the body will then sit there in full view).

I also really appreciate the movement/climbing/mantling system in Mankind Divided. Too often in games you're left either awkwardly bunny hopping onto things, or even arbitrarily standing in front of something like a wall that any normal human would just pull themselves up onto, but game says no. Well in Mankind Divided, I found myself sometimes moving objects around to create a path for myself. And it will let you reasonably grab onto things that look right. For example jumping on top of a bin then onto a wall unit air conditioner, Adam will just grab it and pull himself up. This made exploring fun and worthwhile. At one point I found a garage lock up with pictures of me inside, and a note for another safe in an apartment, as I looked across the road I saw what was surely the apartment on the second floor. So I pulled a bin up, jumped on top of that, onto the garage, then across some window ledges and onto the balcony and discovered a whole lot of world building lore that was going on in the background, stuff you could easily miss.

The one thing I felt on reflection was the lack of crescendo boss fights. In Deus Ex Human Revolution, you're after three heavily augmented individuals, and that resulted in these boss fights about every 5 missions (with their own problems initially, but Director's Cut fixed that), but when I arrived at the end of Mankind Divided, there was that boss fight and it was at that moment I realised nothing I'd done in the main story line had really prepared me for the boss fight, I wasn't used to having to fight hardened opponents, I'd snuck past everyone and hacked my way around the game. Spoiler ahead To it's credit, I really appreciate when games respect their own rules, I hate it when they change the rules for a boss fight or make them super spongey. In the end I was able to EMP him and just use a takedown on him. So I like that the game still made sense in it's own way.

I accidentally went through the whole main game conserving ammo because I didn't realise when you picked up duplicate guns they would just turn into ammo, so I was about 2 hours from the end when I accidentally picked up a duplicate stun gun and it gave me 4 extra bullets. Kicked myself for that one :)

The last thing I will say on the main game is that the ending felt like it had really built towards something. There's even a hidden scene in the credits that feels like it was building towards a bigger reveal, and I thought possibly the DLC would deal with that, but it doesn't, it's entirely contained stories.

I've got 1500 hours in ark, and easily hundreds between other survival games like Conan Exiles, Atlas, Minecraft etc.

Valheim takes a nice setting, combines it with a decent combat system, but instead of forcing you to tediously watch your water and food bar, it instead rewards you with buffs for doing survival mechanics, but doesn't punish you with death for not eating.

In most survival games, say you just want to get on with building a basic house/shelter, you're probably going to be stocking up on some food and water before you start, and burning through it as you use up stamina gathering wood or whatever.

In Valheim if you don't eat your health will drop to 25 and you'll have 3 bars of stamina, but you can build to your heart's content until your ready to go out and do your next thing. It's honestly just refreshing to get to do whatever you find fun, and survival mechanics are a buff rather than an absolute obligation.

You're rewarded with better stamina and health pools when you eat. You can't just shotgun 20 meat, you're encouraged to eat 3 different kinds of food like mushrooms, blueberries and raspberries might give you ~60 health and 5 bars of stamina, but 2 different types of meat and a piece of honey still give you maybe 85-90 health and a higher regen which can be handy for facing a boss.

The combat system includes meaningful feeling swings of your melee weapon, they will hit multiple objects/enemies of they're in the radius. There's dodging and parry so even a newish player can take on difficult enemies if they manage their attack and prepare well.

Items have degradation, but repairing them at a workbench doesn't cost any resources, so it's more like you recondition them for use. This is another example of the streamlining of the survival elements. You need to manage your tools, but your axe breaking isn't then going to send you on a half hour hunt for the right items to repair it.

Staging and staggering of resources feels more organic rather than an artificial barrier of not having the right tech tree unlocked. In the beginning you have melee weapons and can fight boars and these little green monsters called neck tails for meat and resources because those animals are aggressive and will run at you. But you're unlikely to kill a deer early on because they run away, for that you'll need to craft a bow from leather which you get from boars, you then kill deer for deer hide that lets you make better armour to face the first boss and get your first pick axe and mine metals in more dangerous biomes.

Different unlocks and enemies keep coming organically in this way as you progress to harder biomes.

The building mechanics are also robust offering good enough controls to place pieces where you want, but also including a structural stress, so that you don't get silly things like castles in the sky built on a single column of wood etc.

It's all just the right taste of survival without the punishment for skipping tedious tasks.

A game with a lot of replayability made by devs that listened to feedback and care about the player experience. One of the few long term Early access games that truly achieved it's version 1.0 for all the right reasons.

Play through at least once without mods, then go nuts!

If you told me I could only play one game for the rest of my life, I'd choose Kerbal Space Program.

Althought at time of posting my steam time with this game reads as 99 hours, it's much closer to 600+ as I owned the non-steam version since 2013.

The game is adorable yet brick hard. Frustrating and immensly rewarding all in the best possible ways.

The Kerbals although never really characterised somehow have bundles of personality. There is a child-like naivety to them and their fearless quest to get to space on some very questionable equipment.

The game demands precision and has a steep learning curve, yet somehow there is a fly by the seat of your pants approach to everything. The parts have comedy descriptions throughout "A flatter variant of the OKTO, OKTO2 was most certainly not conceived when one of our engineers sat on a standard OKTO."

There is hours of fun in just building rockets and space planes and flying them before you even manage to achieve orbit, nevermind land on the Mun(Moon) and Duna(Mars) and beyond.

The fun doesn't stop there with a vibrant community of modders who have made changes as small as incresing the strength of joints between parts, to adding new parts for even more varied building, to adding in whole other objectives/game mechanics and even changing the solar system itself to reflect real life size of planets.

I highly recommend the game, and would also recommend any new players and intermediates who are finding difficulty progressing to look up a tutorial series on youtube by a man called Scott Manely, who covers everything from your first 3 part rocket to landing on the Mun.

This game is fantastic. If you've read reviews saying it's repetitive and doesn't have a good story, they missed the point. I'm not saying they're entitled to their opinion, I'm calling them flatout wrong.

This game is on sale so much there's no reason not to own it, especially with the multi-player mod made by www.jc-mp.com, check my videos for a 9minute video showcasing it.

Explode stuff, grapple a helicopter and throw the guy out of it, there's everything to love about this over the top, massive (and I mean MASSIVE) open world.