Recent reviews by cereal

A cautionary tale of what happens when you force a studio to pivot to live service games. Redfall is Far Cry 5 meets Borderlands 2, except just a little bit worse and with a vampire-hunting coat of paint. Gone are the immersive sim elements that Arkane is known for; it's a generic looter shooter with a modest open world and slightly above average gunplay.

The game itself is passable, hardly the disaster that it has a reputation for being, but if you're paying more than $20 for this game then you shouldn't be. Go buy Prey or Deathloop instead.

A great game with top-shelf visuals, design, and story. The core gameplay loop is satisfying, though quite difficult. There's minigames, conversations, and more that keep things fresh. The "save the city in 24 hours" hook makes everything you do a bit more urgent, and it all comes together really well.

My pain points were learning the controls and how the levels start to get repetitive maybe 2/3 of the way into the campaign, but truly everything else about this game is excellent.

While impressive in a lot of ways, Ready or Not does not deliver the SWAT experience that it has been touted as. Almost every map is a grueling series of gunfights against a massively superior force, with only a handful of small-scale maps to break up the monotony. The suspect AI has seen very little improvement; while they will no longer turn 180 and headshot you, they have superhuman reaction times, they see perfectly even through obscured sightlines, and they will wallbang you perfectly through cover. They also have no regard for their own lives, and they have very little variation in behavior. It's extremely difficult to approach each scenario as anything other than a fight to the death.

Now that it's out, let's also talk about the campaign for a minute. The writing is quite hamfisted and seems focused on shock value above all else. Multiple mass shooting levels (including one that's a very explicit reference to the Pulse nightclub shooting), a strange focus on a pedophile ring that gets shoehorned into about half the levels, and a real lack of slower, small levels. With most of the levels being these huge shootouts and the suspects being so aggressive, this game basically just turns into another tactical military shooter where you kill everyone you meet, no matter how many times the game reminds you that you are supposedly a "life-saving organization".

If you're fine playing this as a tactical military shooter, then go for it. But I don't recommend it as the SWAT game it positions itself as.

The only immersive sim to let you both manipulate Gamestop stock and go fishing, and for that it has my praise. It's also a nightmare fuel body-horror hyperviolent acid trip of a game that looks like Hotline Miami, Deus Ex, and every Windows 95 screensaver had a baby. It's an ugly, beautiful crime against conventional aesthetics and design, and if you're willing to put up with some rough edges and weirdness in the search for the next great immersive sim (and you should be), then I 100% recommend this game.

First things first: this product is abandoned. Its last update was in 2018, almost 3 years ago at this point.

I will say, I actually tried this product back in 2018 when my group was looking to switch over from Roll20. Though I desperately wanted to leave Roll20, we only ever played one session on it. I have pretty good internet, but on a self-hosted server, the loading times between scenes were absolutely awful. Like, multiple minutes in some cases. That, combined with the fact that this product hasn't seen any support, means we never came back. Which is a shame, because the UI was much cleaner, it had a lot of cool features, and it was probably a better product - it was just too clunky and never got fixed.

If you're looking to leave Roll20, check out Foundry VTT instead. It's a similar application, a one-time purchase, but actually gets regular updates and has an amazing developer community.

I feel like this game kind of flew under everyone's radar, possibly because its advertising was uninspiring or possibly because it doesn't do anything really new. But what it does do, it does well. Rage 2 is basically Doom: Open World Edition. Once you get used to the clunky controls and interface, which are clearly designed only for console, it's actually a lot of fun. The guns are solid and beefy, combat is fast-paced and visceral, and the steady pace of upgrades & unlocks makes for a pretty rewarding open-world experience.

Not GOTY by any means, but if you liked Doom and like open-world games then this is a pretty safe bet.

Cyberpunk is at once an awesome, beautiful game, and a janky, overhyped mess. Enjoying Cyberpunk is a matter of expectations. Are you expecting a revolutionary RPG that changes everything you know about the genre where Keanu Reeves gently sucks you off as you play? This isn't it. But despite the jank and lack of polish, it's got a beautiful world with fantastic art and modeling, it's got fairly satisfying combat, and it's got the most important feature of any open-world RPG: a ton of awesome side quests. Pick it up if you get a chance, but make sure your system's up to spec, and give it room to grow on you.

EDIT: UPDATE 2 YEARS LATER
No two ways about it, Cyberpunk 2077 launched in a pretty broken state. But 2 years later, this game has received all the polish it needed and it's a thing of absolute beauty. The Phantom Liberty DLC adds tons of (good!) new content to the game. The reworked combat and skill systems make combat far more engaging. And all the amazing writing, narrative design, and quest design that went into this game finally has room to breathe. The game has evolved beautifully from its initial release two years ago, and there is no better time to play this game than now.

This recommendation is a very conflicted one. Bethesda games have always come with a certain level of jank, and that's certainly no different in Fallout 76. Most of the rough edges from launch have been smoothed out, but they are by no means gone. You'll still encounter enemies that don't take damage from your attacks, pathing issues, clipping issues, and just plain weirdness. There's still no interesting or challenging end-game content besides grinding for hours and hours. But the worst influence on this game is the Atom Store and Fallout 1st. The game has been made actively hostile to the player's experience with low storage capacity, expensive fast travel, and harsh survival requirements - and convenience is then sold back to the player at a premium. It's frankly a disgusting business model.

However, Fallout 76 is still a Bethesda game. And while that means jank, it also means legendary experiences found nowhere else in gaming. It means stepping out of the Vault for the first time and seeing a beautiful view of Appalachia spread out before you, ready to be explored. It means wandering into an abandoned building and unraveling the mystery of what happened there long ago. There's a very satisfying gameplay loop of explore -> fight -> loot -> craft -> repeat. The voice acting is phenomenal and I personally enjoyed both the main quest and the dozens of intricately-crafted side quests. I have sunk dozens of hours into this game (back on the Bethesda.net launcher, not on Steam) and I really did enjoy every hour of it.

Is this game the best bang for your buck? Absolutely not. But there's still plenty of bang, and there's nothing else quite like it out there.

You get every Yugioh card ever printed for the single price of $40, and for that alone this game is totally worth it. Like, end of review. Easily the cheapest way to play Yugioh. But it does take a long time to grind out enough credits to earn all of the cards in the game, unless you use an external program to edit memory values - which I highly recommend doing.

There's also some other minor problems, like an outdated UI, unskippable animations, and not being able to play friends in an Unlimited format. Also an annoying bug where the Steam overlay breaks for the rest of the session if you go into Deck Edit mode, and you have to restart the game to fix it. But overall, if you like Yugioh and want to play it on the computer, then get this game for sure.

Dark souls is hard, but it never feels unfair. There's a rhythm to combat, a swing-swing-dodge-roll-repeat sequence that you can fall into. Bosses telegraph their moves. You can grind better gear or summon a friend if you're having trouble.

This game is both hard AND unfair. An enemy that does 100 damage per attack looks similar to one that does 20 per attack. And they're in the same area. Tutorials will get you started but fail to properly explain the game's core mechanics. Also, you don't "die" in this game - you're just knocked out. But depending on how you fall in combat, this can mean you either lose basically nothing, or all of your gear and weapons. Your failures compound quickly, and will leave you in a position that takes FAR longer to recover from than if you had just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ died. It is an exercise in frustration and I do not recommend it unless you enjoy frustrating games.