Recent reviews by Tarkus

Casual co-op action with surprising amount of depth. Revolving around 4 classes, you get to develop and upgrade each one to fit your play style. While some builds might be more optimal than others, you can make most options work and with several difficulty levels to choose from, you can tailor the gameplay experience to your liking. For more hardcore and competitive players, the deep dives and various difficulty options offer a proper challenge.

The "endgame" gameplay does not directly any goals to work towards, which can be either a positive or negative, depending on the player. There are a lot of weapon modifications and cosmetics to collect, but most dedicated players might find themselves not having too much to do, as content upgrades and patches come in relatively slowly.

Considering the affordable price, especially at sale, Deep Rock Galactic is a steal and worth trying out, especially for more casual players.

Armored Core 6 is yet another From Software success story, reviving a dormant franchise in a niche genre and making it appealing to the wider audiences.

The difficulty which From Software is known for is present in AC6, but the game is also very forgiving, allowing you to change your build during a missions which can make the hard bosses and missions feel manageable or even easy. While you can keep using one build you feel comfortable with, some missions might force you to try new approaches which brings variety to the gameplay.

Great art direction and awesome set pieces make the game joy to look at. The soundtrack has some exciting tracks which elevate the already great moments.

The story takes a while to get going, but unlike many of From Software's other titles, story is presented straightforwardly. There are some choices you can make to change the direction of the story and NG+ / NG++ playthroughs offer additional context and new missions.

As the final installment in the Frog Detective series, Corruption at Cowboy Country is a great sendoff. Open world exploration, large cast and smart writing elevate Frog Detective 3 above its predecessors in all categories.

(Review regarding multiplayer beta)
Halo "work in progress" Infinite is an excellent core of a game. The gameplay feels very good, guns are mostly balanced and feel kinetic. There is still some adjustments to be done to how melee works. The maps have good variety and are well suited for the game modes presented. However the lack of dedicated per mode playlist is annoying, especially in the context of the games biggest flaw as of now: the progression system. Gaining XP only via daily and weekly challenges is a terrible thing for the games flow, this incentives playing for the challenges and not for the objective or for fun, as you feel compelled to play certain way if you want to progress your battle pass. The developers have hinted at fixes and changes coming to this, which is good to hear. Depending on what you look for in a game, the current state of the progression system can be a deal breaker, but since the core experience feels good to play and its free, the game still earns a positive review and I believe Halo Infinite has a bright future ahead of it.

Amazing atmosphere, interesting and unique mechanics, great, but perhaps bit bloated story.

While the gameplay elements are quite simple; move around camera, complete puzzles and "mini games", they did not end up becoming a chore during the games reasonable 6-8 h run time.
The incredibly strong and authentic feeling environmental design is joy to look at and to explore.
Story keeps up a good pace through out the whole game and the collectable audio logs and documents provide more detail for those players who want to learn everything there is to know about the story and characters. Towards the end, I felt that the story might have benefited from having a bit narrower scope, there clearly were a lot of ideas that the writers wanted to explore, but having them all in one narrative might have been too much. Despite this, the story was definitely gripping enough to keep me interested the whole way.

A technical mess, outdated, bloated and too much fun.

This game has no right to be as entertaining as it is. Shooting is floaty at best, the story nonsensical and irrelevant on best of days, yet I somehow keep coming back for more and can't wait for Payday 3. Getting into Payday 2 right now might be a hugely daunting task with years worth of content and added mechanics which are not explained properly, but if you can get a group of friends together and sift through all of the bloat, you might find something special here.

One of the best arguments for "games as art" from recent years. Each and every area in the game looks absolutely stunning and any screenshot you take could serve as an beautiful wallpaper. GRIS has no dialogue, but still manages to convey an emotional story via visual storytelling.

While the gameplay might be "simplistic", its more than enough for GRIS, making it accessible for large audience. The game is on the shorter side, done in 5 hours if you take your time (as you should), the audio-visual experience more than makes up for the short duration and the cost, especially if on sale.

Hollow Knight is a game of mind-boggling value and a mountain of quality content. The game offers you kingdom and its mysteries to unravel, several absolutely beautiful crafted areas, various items and skills to collect, dozens of memorable and unique bosses and incredibly tough challenges to beat.

You can easily sink 50 hours into this game and with the 4 post launch updates, it will take a good while for you to run out of content.

Even if you aren't fan of metroidvania games, you should absolutely give Hollow Knight a try.

Short version: If you like the first two games, this is largely more of the same and a solid experience. Just know that there is less combat compared to Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Longer but not too long version: Shadow of the Tomb Raider is game that could have been so much more. Story shows hints of brilliance, but never fully embraces the dark tones that are hinted at.

Amount of combat has been reduced by significant amount and this can be good or bad thing depending on what you enjoy about the Tomb Raider games. The surprisingly large weapon and upgrade collection feels bit out of place when you are allowed to shoot something every couple hours. However, what the game lacks in shooting has been filled by 9 challenge tombs, couple of side missions, optional crypts and more artifacts with interesting stories to find.

As mentioned before, Story is decent but not all it could be. There is exploration into Lara's darker side but this story arc is never fleshed out and feels unfinished.

The five or so main actors do a good job in their roles, delivery on critical story moments is excellent. However, the side characters can range from bad to taking you out of the game terrible.

Game is very pleasing to look at and runs very well even on older hardware besides frame drops in hub areas.

For fans of the series this is worth buying, especially on sale. If you weren't feeling the first two games, Shadow of The Tomb Raider isn't going to change your mind.

As I understand, Shadow of the Tomb Raider didn't sell too well so it wouldn't be surprising if this is the last Tomb Raider game we are getting for some years. I deeply hope that we will see more of this underrated franchise soon, but I have my doubts.

Prey is terribly underrated Immersive sim and it deserves your attention. Its like a new Bioshock game, and this time in space. The game struggles with its pacing during early and late game, but it does not become a huge issue. Story is gripping enough to keep your attention and there is plenty of extra lore laying around if that is something you care about. I believe most people can find enjoyment for atleast 2 full playtroughs of the game and even after that, there are more ways to play. Biggest negative comes from lack of weapon variety.

If you love games in gameplay style of Biosock or Dishonored, this is absolutely worth a try.