Recent reviews by HazardousMonkey

WAS Fantastic, now entirely unplayable due to always-online networking issues and game breaking crashes.

If you can somehow sneak your way past the main menu, somehow not crash instantly when trying to select a map, and somehow make it into a populated lobby without running into constant disconnect issues, you'll probably have a great time. Until these issues are resolved, it's a hard pass.

Elden Ring, even at its most average points, makes Breath of the Wild seem like an indie early access game.

The design will soon have you coming to expect an entire new world tucked away around any corner, or some "final boss" quality enemy to encounter where other games might hide a single item. Enemy designs are continually mind blowing, with some of the most fluid and dynamic animation sets I've ever seen. There are countless weapons to use, with a many of them even having completely unique move sets within the same class of weapon. If it weren't for the consistent ass kicking I was receiving, the visuals alone have my jaw at the floor. FromSoftware has once again crafted an amazing world within the AAA landscape of cash grabs and failed promises. I really could go on about everything I liked about this game, but I'll cut it short here.

That's not to say there weren't also legitimate things to complain about:

• There was one boss in particular (mr. slim and big fatty) that BLEW MY MIND when it came to their design, phases, and extremely demanding difficulty. I first found this boss within a completely unrelated and secluded dungeon, but to my dismay, later discovered that they would be reused THREE MORE times in unrelated locations, including one MANDATORY main-quest end-game fight. While I don't believe "bosses" being reintroduced as regular enemies once you're much stronger is a bad thing, finding such a major end-of-game boss MUCH earlier than when you'd fight them in the main story was rather disappointing. They also did similar repeat bosses throughout the game, but to be fair, they were reintroduced in ways that weren't quite as jarring.

• Horse combat is fairly boring and simplistic. Once I felt confident, I mainly used the horse to get around, then fought on my own two feet.

• While the modernized enemy animations of Elden Ring are truly stunning, it can sometimes feel as if these advancements are to the game's detriment. Foes are more wild than ever, with it often feeling like you're being attacked by olympic grade gymnasts. To be a bit more specific, it's not all that rare that any given enemy will have some 3-6 chain attack, and will just keep throwing different versions of these at you nonstop. To be clear, it's awesome as hell, but can sometimes feel like the developers just turned it up to 11 with little consideration for interesting back and forth combat or tense pauses. I wouldn't be surprised if you just snagged the biggest shield you could find and abused the hell out of the new block-parry system.

• It's not really a complaint so much as a warning, but you'll need to be extremely mindful of how you're gearing your character and making sure you're not beating your head against something for too long. The world is massive and meant to be explored in a non-uniform manner. It kind of blew my mind to listen to my friends beat their heads against something they obviously weren't ready for, and eventually came to understand how quickly someone can assume that they just need to "git gud". In my experience, this game is actually pretty easy if you just feel out the world and find the areas actually designed for your current progression point, but it goes without saying that non-linear open world games can be difficult to navigate intuitively.

blablabla go play it, easily game of the year and it's only February.

https://i.imgur.com/AJE0xUI.png -- because of a bug, I had to spend half of my playtime (43 hours) on an alt account so that I could play online
https://i.ibb.co/wMrS883/image.png -- kit I had once I completed the final main quest
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For a sequel that could be argued to generally have worse moment-to-moment gameplay than the original, I still believe it's worth playing. Even though the story is really quite dry, and gameplay fairly plain, it was lots of fun to run, jump, swing, and fly throughout the streets, rooftops, and skylines of the two cities this game currently offers. The addition of the "darkness" system and how it affected enemy behavior was awesome, and I found that the literal ticking clock on your life while in the shadows added an interesting element of tension. If you're looking for a huge time killer and bar filler, topped off with zombie and bad guy slaying action, within an ever-expansive and beautiful world, you'll really enjoy yourself.

Sadly, on a more critical level, there was hardly even a single event or foe throughout this game's main story that made me feel as though there was any pressure calling me to action, or any sort of real antagonist keeping our delicate future in the balance. Even having played DL2 on the hardest difficulty, the only thing that kept me on my toes was whether or not a cutscene would put my character in needless danger, or make me out to be a total wuss... even though I usually arrive to them having just finished prancing my way through the night, slaying countless terrors, with a Tier 4 chase behind me so that I gain an EXP bonus.

This brings me to my greatest disappointment of the game: the NIGHT. In Dying Light 1, assuming you didn't chicken out, it felt as though the darkness itself was your primary antagonist. While major and minor characters shape the world, they all fear the night. The nightmarish Volatiles, making up the bulk of the night creatures, lurk around every corner, are on every surface, and even though they were one of the only enemies in the game, their deadly presence and believable AI behavior made for a truly terrifying "shark in the water" kind of atmosphere. In contrast, DL2 uses Howlers as the primary threat at night. On a surface level, these new enemies introduce a much more fluid version of the Chase System, which does a great job of laying on the pressure when you allow yourself to be caught by one. On a practical level, however, the Howlers, being so lazily distributed on the streets, are almost never a threat at any stage of the game. They're so extremely easy to avoid that the player could believably finish the entire game without being chased in any serious capacity. To be more specific, the spawning system only allows them to spawn at a fixed distance from each other, and they're generally spaced out in an unnatural geometric style grid every 50 feet or so on the absolute lowest levels of the world. They're also COMPLETELY idle, making this grid beyond obvious. This is in stark contrast to DL1's fluid Volatile spawning system that included believable search/movement patterns from the AI even when they don't know you're there. I'm not trying to say that DL1's night system was aMaZiNG, but it was at least a little more than an EXP boost when you chose to run in it.

Separately and completely unrelated, I found the characters and how they fit in the story's timeline to make no sense whatsoever. I was continually confused by the idea that after 15 years, these two cities still require a lone hero to come in and turn on the water, or to sort out day-1 style squabbles. In contrast to DL1 taking place months after first infection, I was hoping we would have a chance to see these struggles from the perspective of matured Individuals and communities after they've (as we're being told) survived this hell hole for 15 YEARS. Instead, you as a glorified hiker will be one of the only people to make a difference in a city full of would-be veteran survivors.

I think many of my frustrations with DL2 stem from the fact that I believe DL1 was done well, and it's disappointing that their several times delayed sequel doesn't quite match up. Things like multiplayer progress not saving for anyone but the host, lacking ANY firearms, shops having insane prices for anything gear related, the gear (clothes) system in general, the fact that I beat the game with less than probably ~30 weapons ever used, the cooler areas just being a copy and paste of one another, poor enemy scaling between both single and multiplayer, etc etc...

but yeah pretty kool game

With the current AAA game development landscape plagued by cash grabs and half baked releases, Cyberpunk, while hardly a perfect game, delivers a feature-complete product that simply needs a little icing on the cake to round out the experience.
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Having (so far) completed the main story and many of the major side quests of the game on Hard, I was continually impressed with the level design, graphics, many of the weapons, and how serious cdProject Red takes their CP2077 world-building. while there were a few immersion breaking moments due to the item & leveling systems affecting quest flow, it's a far cry from similar AAA caliber releases which can almost entirely be described as "gamey".

While that was all fine and dandy, I was however often disappointed by frequent dry dialog options, the enemies consistently feeling extremely simplistic and stupid, and an item system that at times felt more like a chore to collect and go through than a fun gameplay mechanic.
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All in all, again, not a perfect game, but those looking for a new singleplayer adventure shouldn't need to think too long about picking this one up... assuming you can run it.

From start to finish, I was genuinely surprised at how amazingly deep and interesting this game was. For a title I'd never heard of, I could hardly keep my hands off it for my first ~80 hour playthrough. Every second was filled with interesting things to discover and fun enemies to manage.

This will go down as one of my all time favorite games.

One of the best wave survival coop shooters ever released, with tons of available community content and a surprising amount of depth to be found. While the gameplay loop can be quite repetitive, the moment to moment action can keep you going for hundreds, if not thousands of hours.