Uncle Boss 最近的评测

I bought the game release day and still it's so buggy as to be unplayable, even after a month-and-a-half and multiple patches.

I would refund this game were I not over the two hour limit. To be honest, I don't know how I even have four hours clocked. I guess I just really wanted to play this game. There is a smooth, performant game there underneath all the glitches.

I let myself look forward to this video game thereby breaking my number one rule wrt video games: never look forward to anything. I even went so far as to buy two copies at the time so I could gift one to my stepson so we could play together. However, not only is the game buggy for me, it's also buggy for him as well. It's a bummer. I double-dipped and I got double-♥♥♥♥♥♥.

-Broken, stuttering audio that cuts out.
-Broken, jerky animations that also cut out
-Enemies pop into existence, teleport around. Probably related to the broken animations.

Literally the only Souls game I've played.

Pretty fun shooting when you can but this game likes to waste your time with a lot dumb crap that's not shooting.

You can read the store page and other reviews to learn about the specific features. I want to tell anyone reading this that this game has been bug, glitch & crash free; the gameplay proves slick with a fluid movement system that's very fun; and the cornucopia of options and mutators available to the player keeps the experience feeling fresh time and time again. I don't know anything about the developers but their passion for the game is evident in the craftsmanship on display, and in the fact that the game continues to be updated with new features and content even a couple of years after release. On top of all this, you have the workshop with community content to further expand the game with. Basically, what I'm trying to say is, Severed Steel rules and is worth the asking price. These are the kinds of games worth supporting.

(a multiplayer mode with the likes of deathmatch and ctf would compliment this game like pb&j, tho)

Morrowind's je ne sais quoi has kept me engrossed for twenty-plus years, and probably until I die.

It's comfy.

I've been "playing" this since like janky alpha 0.1 or 0.2 and this release version hardly feels improved over those early versions. Before I was willing to forgive it because it was "janky alpha" but it's been literally years at this point and now it's being sold as a "finished" product I guess so it's time to give my unsolicited impression of it.

I've been a fan of Postal 2 ever since release and I'd rank it among my all time favorite games. I don't play it as often as I used to (countless hours and days spent playing the old CD version) but I did complete a full playthrough of Postal 2 plus A Week In Paradise last year and as I've gotten older it's interesting to see what has aged well and what hasn't (a surprising amount has) and to see how Postal 4 is shaping up in comparison.

So I'll just get into it.

Postal 4 runs so bad I would be embarrassed if this were my "finished" product, and after as much time as it has had in development, and for as empty and static the world is, in conjunction with the 2003-esque loading zones that the world is broken into, this lack of performance optimization is unacceptable. It's not even a matter of low frame rates but that it also varies wildly with no rhyme or reason. It'll bob up and down from 20fps to 120fps in the same area, sometimes even in the same scene! Even in those rare moments where my frame rate is 60 or more it doesn't feel smooth, there's a consistent micro stutter in addition to the fluctuating, low frame rate. This has been the biggest hurdle to me playing this game for any period of time longer than 20 minutes.

Putting the awful performance aside, exploring the world itself has been disappointing. This is being made with I think Unreal Engine 4 and yet everything is static and fixed in place like it's Unreal Engine 2 still. So much of the environment is just static dressing with no interaction it actively detracts from the experience. Go drop a grenade in a random living room and marvel at how not a single thing gets thrown around or breaks. See that empty bucket, or basketball sitting on the ground? Run into it and it'll stop you in your tracks because it is an immovable object. For as many NPCs as there are meandering around in some areas, everything is empty and lifeless. Many buildings and dwellings are empty, as most NPCs are meandering in the streets and the NPCs (and the Postal Dude) look like dolls, which fits with the static dollhouse-like world they inhabit, I guess.

The humor and writing is dire. I'm not saying Postal 2 is some ironic masterpiece, it definitely has some ♥♥♥♥ in it that has aged horribly, but it felt earnest in it's attempts. I think as time went on and Postal 2 developed this reputation of being "the worst game ever" the way people began to engage with it started to change. The early 2000's parody's of various groups became satire and the point of it became to punch at various groups for the sake of punching rather than just laughing at some ridiculous ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The clownish parts became emphasized and the more "sinister" tones of the setting became absorbed into this. Postal 4 feels like a fan-game that's focused on one part of a two part recipe. The Postal Dude is now the sometimes violent straight man in a wacky world instead of the disgruntled psycho in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, absurd world. P2 Postal Dude is your weirdo loner cousin nobody really talks to at the family gatherings and P4 Postal Dude is your loser divorced uncle. Sure, you don't want to be around either of them, but it's different flavors of repulsiveness. I don't want to say Postal 4 is the flanderized version of Postal but it's toeing that line. It's like the devs are writing a sequel to a greatest hits album. Postal 2 was a lot of regular, mundane situations suddenly spinning out of control with the introduction of some outside variable and there's a build up over the course of the game in the absurdness. As far as I can tell there's nothing like "Go cash your paycheck at the bank" with an actual line you can wait in to do so until bank robbers break in. In Postal 4 it's just clown ♥♥♥♥ from the get go.

The game feels unfocused . The updates are seemingly random collections of whatever the devs have thought up that month in addition to bugfixes with no improvements to performance ever. The environments feel unfinished, half the cutscenes are animated ingame while the other half (including the opening cinematic to the game!) are literally just moving pictures. The gameplay loop feels lackluster and mediocre. I could not give less of a ♥♥♥♥ about collectible dolls, chasing after stray dogs... I mean the missions are as boring as watching paint dry. I don't know if they get any more interesting or better in the latter half of the game because as I've already mentioned the awful performance has made it unbearable to actually play this game in addition to it's other shortcomings. They added in multiple versions of the Postal Dude's voice acting to choose from, which is cool no doubt but the fact that something like that was just added in this late in development while there is so much other, much more important work that needs to be done kinda paints a picture to me where maybe there isn't some grand plan in place and the devs are instead winging it and going with whatever sounds cool at the moment. I mean, ffs, they literally just released a 20gb "content update" today that added... a sledgehammer and rubber mallet... a help section in the menu.... dogs can randomly pee... cops confiscate your stuff upon arrest... hate groups like in Postal 2... more bugfixes... no performance optimizations.... police helicopters.... Why is this update 20gb? And this is supposed to be some big content update? Why hasn't the opening cutscene been updated with an actual cutscene yet? What is even going on at RWS?

Do the devs plan on just updating this game forever? For as much updating as this game gets it still feels lackluster compared to Postal 2, not just technically or gameplay wise, but in just the sheer amount of content available to the player to engage with. I assume at some point they'll have to stop working on Postal 4. What state will the game be in then? This still feels like a janky alpha and it honestly kinda makes me mad a little that they're selling this as a finished product. This isn't even a "he-he this is a so bad on purpose it's good" type situation, Postal 4 is just straight up mediocre. I had more but I've been writing this so long it's getting hard keeping it straight.

tl;dr: Buy and play Postal 2 instead.

*For whatever reason this isn't tracking my time but I've spent a good 18 hours playing this DLC at the time of writing this review:

Every battle in this DLC features endlessly spawning enemies, and some of those enemies spawn more enemies of their own on top of the ones the level itself is spitting out. At least one of these encounters features "Monster Mash" on repeat and with so many enemy units you'll be hearing that song at least once per turn, it's absurd.

There's also stacking radiation debuffs that can't be removed with already existing anti-radiation medicine but can be removed with special DLC specific items that can only be accessed partway through. If you can't get to that part of the DLC where this becomes available to you because of the aforementioned endless spawning enemy mechanic then congrats! You have permanent debuffs that never expire and can't be treated by doctors!

I'm at the point where my resources have been depleted from throwing myself at these encounters for hours, my squad is gimped from a radiation debuff that can't be removed with already existing anti-radiation medicine, and I'm forced to leave the DLC to try and get some more money and ammo to keep trying. I'd like to explore and dig into this DLC but it's own mechanics are aggressively opposed to that.

It's truly mind-boggling that they took one of the worst parts of Steeltown and doubled-down on it for Holy Detonation. WTF.

It's just especially disappointing because my work schedule only allows me a few hours on the weekends to play games and I spent all my free time playing this DLC and got nowhere with it.

UPDATE: The latest hotfix appears to have fixed the technical issues I was facing my first time through as my second trip through has yielded a stable, bug-free experience. Additionally, my second playthrough has given me better insight into the consequences of different choices and I'm pleased just about everything I can think of has been accounted for. I say just about everything because the core narrative issues mentioned in my original review below remain and there's one encounter in particular that doesn't seem to change no matter what choices you make up to that point--that fight is just unavoidable and that's a bummer.

Still, it's not a bad DLC. The new gameplay mechanics introduced are interesting and it's nice to see the developers attempts to mix up the formula a bit even if everything they try doesn't land perfectly. The technical glitches that were my primary problem with this DLC have seemingly been fixed and so I see no reason to not recommend this. The $14 price tag is still pushing it, though. I'd wait for a sale unless you really like Wasteland.

==What follows below is my original review==

Battle of Steeltown -- what can I really say other than I got hit with a game-breaking bug that stopped me from progressing any further in the game. I eventually got around it by reloading progressively earlier saves and playing through until it didn't glitch.

Besides glitches, Battle of Steeltown's ideas and themes in the narrative feel shallow and half-baked in their presentation.

You're constantly TOLD what's happening rather than being SHOWN what's happening. Apart from one side quest involving two idiot researchers, and a couple of injured NPCs laying around as decoration, you just aren't presented with anything the narrative is telling you is happening. Even the strike that has brought Steeltown to a standstill and is central to the story is barely shown.

What you are presented with is a series of combat encounters against a bunch of "striking workers", who, you're told, haven't killed anybody--as opposed to the robotic security forces who have killed multiple people. You are expected to use ~non-lethal weapons~ to fight these workers with--but then the game also makes a point to tell you these non-lethal weapons still essentially maim and cripple people, which begs the question, what's the point? There's other narrative issues too but I won't get lost in the weeds here.

I got probably half way through the DLC when I encountered the game-breaking bug. That alone makes it impossible for me to recommend this to anybody, narrative issues aside.

Were the bugs to be fixed, I would recommend this on sale for $5.

==========

Well, bugs have been fixed.

It's a badass game for badass sex-havers.