Recent reviews by Istarune

While the Gameplay is what you would enjoy, how they handle it is awful.

They abuse Easy Anti Cheat to bypass harware restrictions, and push your hardware more than it should.

It legit over-taxed my Power Supply to the point it died, and thankfully it wasn't my CPU.

A great game ruined by executives telling people that a few extra frames per second is worth frying hardware.

Here we sit, almost a month post release and the game is still riddled with game-breaking bugs rendering people unable to finish. But, theoretically, these bugs will eventually be gone and the game will be able to be completed. Here's why even with that you should still avoid this game.

1) Overly sticking to the source material.
Sound strange? It's not...there are plenty of things from tabletop that don't translate to video games, and vice versa. Too much effort was thrown into maintaining parity with the tabletop RPG, and not enough into adapting the material to what both works, and is fun in a faster paced, digital environment.

2) Inattention to balance, and lack of scaling. Encounters are locked to specific difficulties, with no variation or scaling based on player level, or often indication of difficulty. While, once again, this is loyal to a module, this is poor design for a video game. You can wander into an area, or even get a random encounter, populated with monsters several levels above you, and in greater numbers than your active party. This is especially egregious in the early game (1-5 range) where you can encounter multiple L4-L6 enemies when you are L2, and can have as few as 4 party members. This is compounded by the fact that enemy count has been increased, while EXP gain has been decreased compared to the tabletop module.

Top this off with poorly chosen Companion Classes, and the sledgehammer approach to difficulty making the unoptimized Companion NPCs deficiency come into laser focus and you have a rather miserable face to something that could have been iconic.

I have to wonder how much of this was Paizo's direction, vs OwlCat's inexperience in creating this sort of game. Either way it lends itself a rather poor execution of a rather good concept. Only buy if you are the most stalwart of fans of the CRPG genre, or the Pathfinder system.

I noticed I still had a negative review for this game from launch. I needed to fix it.

No Man's Sky is a tale of a developer who was made to launch earlier than intended, but kept going to make the game more and more amazing, without charging extra.

This is a love letter from developers who care, and the game far exceeds what it was originally pitched as. A half decade of love was put into this after launch. Without extra profit from DLC sales for each new feature, just a desire to make an amazing space game.

Highly recommend.

Whatever you do, don't buy The Full Package, or the Unlockable/Horror packs.

They forcibly remove parts of the game and give you things that you might not want on your character.

EDIT: Steam now allows you to manualls select DLC you install, take advatage of this and enjoy!

Clocking in around 10 hours of gameplay, it's a bit short, could have fleshed out a couple of acts a bit more with exploration.

However, it incorporates all of the good elements of a real action-adventure game, gives Lara and crew a personality and backstory, and leads you into a fairly novel way of incorporating several different types of set-pieces into a single area. Several parts of the game make you feel quite alone and vulnerable, but there are a few randomly dispersed fight sections that really break the survivalist feel at times. Lara'as personality evolves from a timid normal girl, to what would be more familiar to followers of the series from beginning of the game to the end. Lara suffers some persistent wounds through the game, and her outfit changes as it gets worn down, very immersive. Puzzles are fairly simple, and rarely will you get frustrated with anything "unsolvable", this game is far more about story than solving.

Also, Lara has realistically sized tits, so that's a plus.

Overall, probably a 8.3/10, a strong reboot that really sets the tone for future games, without destroying any good memories.

Looking for a low-cost game that will challenge your mind and consume hours upon hours of freetime? Dungeon Defenders fits the bill.

Combining the best elements of tower Defense games and Diablo, take on the role of one of Four heros, each with their own combat skills and array of towers, and defend the Eternia Crystals from the rampaging army of Goblins, Orcs, Kobolds, Wyvrens, and Dark Elves.

4.5/5