Recent reviews by Nordrir

A fun, if gruesome, game with a lot of little secrets - thoroughly enjoyed it, although it could definitely benefit from more content.

A quite unique little gem of a game, exploring your capacity for learning how to decrypt languages from symbolism and pattern recognition, while following an interesting storyline. The color pallette can be a little rough on the eyes here and there, but that's my only real issue with the game. Big thumbs up.

This is a little gem of a game - not very long, but oozing creativity. So many possibilities, and a really quite amazingly flexible toolset makes for a brilliant delve into directional storytelling. I HEARTILY recommend anybody with a penchant for storytelling to take a dip.

Positively brilliant writing, complexity, ideas behind the game mechanics, voice acting - if there's ONE downside, it's that I would have loved it to be much much longer. There's a whole world to explore in this extended universe, and this studio definitely has the ability to do so. Let us see more.

Overall, it's a good series of games, cute graphics, good humor, great world building - however the controls can easily be very janky, making the incredibly high precision necessary to complete some parts fairly frustrating and completely ruins the momentum. I'm sure the difficulty masochists will claim that's the only good part, but to me that's the parts that just slows the entire thing down and makes it boring for any length of time. Still, worth it for the good parts, but if you're not one of the aforementioned masochists, don't go into this for the achievement hunting, you're going to get very bored. Just get through the game and enjoy the journey for what it is.

One of the very best puzzle games I've ever played. Just stay away from Crash... All the parts that made the base game fun and interesting have been replaced with frustration, repetition, loading times, and removing all semblance of fun in the DLC.

Cutesy, has some fun and new mechanics, nice visual style. However, the additions of challenges and the extension of the explorability, despite what they give you the impression of, are not very good. I really wanted to like it, but as usual, platforming in first person easily becomes frustrating when the controls don't give the necessary freedom; which this does not. The "puzzles" aren't hard, don't really need any brain power, only a bit of reflexes, and that isn't really enough to keep me engaged beyond the initial fascination.

As is probably evident for most people at this point, this is far from the smoothest of launches, and even despite a dedicated effort from the developers, they are not really managing to fix the inherently broken aspects. What's worse is that there is some clear indications that the development team, while ambitious, have not learned from the mistakes of other MMO developers, continuously making basic errors that others have ironed out over a decade ago.

The game is beautiful, it's got some fulfilling mechanics, a bit of innovation in their basic mechanics, and is surprisingly optimized to even run great on systems that aren't top of the line - but unfortunately that's also largely where the buck stops. The game has a relatively good storyline at its heart, but due to the heavy PvP aspect at the core of the mechanics they are marketing themselves on to set the game apart from others, I would be very surprised to find anybody that have bothered even halfway listening to it. The world is over all great for roleplayers, but the target demographic largely couldn't care less, which also means that by far most players you meet are named after a variety of bodily functions, celebrities, and memes, and act as one would expect. The setting is great, but it will not matter to the target demographic - and for those that enjoy it, they'll quickly be turned away by said target demographic.

In addition to that, there are simply too many damn breaking bugs. It's hard to market yourself on something new and innovative, when that is the specific function that is the most broken, causing new weekly issues, shutting down various elements to avoid exploitation, etc. - In addition to that, it markets itself on PvP being optional, but on the PvE aspect there's little to nothing that really sets it apart from other games, in fact it's fairly inferior in most PvE aspects, including crafting/tradeskills, to games like for instance Lord of the Rings Online. It doesn't mean it isn't fun as long as you don't look too deep, but it's really not living up to the ambitions they had, and it's sadly very clear that they are struggling to keep up with just putting out the fires, caused largely by inexperience with the format.

Currently it's a solid pastime, as long as you aren't looking for anything deep, and you don't get too frustrated with bugs that cause you to be unable to craft, unable to hit mobs, unable to change weapons, unable to dodge, failing harvesting, or any of another long list of intermittent errors that might pop up here and there. But it's got no staying power, no depth, and unless Amazon makes sweeping changes to the platform they have built, learning from the lessons others have gone through, they are going to get burned by it again.

It's one of the best FPS games created to date, with absolutely amazing controls and interesting mechanics. I can't say enough great things about the single player, with great story, gunplay, and graphics (although you'll learn to hate the spider bots more than anything else. Their area damage is a LOT bigger than you expect)

Just stay away from the multiplayer - unfortunately it's overrun with cheaters (primarily aimbot users), which are circumventing the server side detection software, which also hasn't been updated for years at this point, as Apex is taking Respawn's focus. As a result, Titanfall 2's multiplayer is one of the most frustrating sandboxes for cheaters currently, and you'll definitely see your share of it if you decide to forage into it. Despite being an equally great multiplayer experience, it's just not worth the frustration.

This game is a prime example of great ideas (inspired heavily by other older games, such as Ascendancy), some nice polish, but absolutely heinous balancing. People will find that even on the easiest difficulties, the AI will throw curve balls at you completely beyond your own capabilities. Pirates in the game can for instance hit you with armies more than 5x your max strength in the very first turn. Ships that vastly outmatch the opponent, will deal zero damage to their armies, despite having countered all their fleet actions. Basically, in lieu of balancing the game and creating meaningful AI, they basically just allowed the AI to "cheat" to get an edge. An edge that passes into the ridiculous.

Some races will have an easier time, some settings can be disabled to avoid the worst caveats, but right out of the box, the game is just incredibly broken. If you don't do everything according to a very specific plan of what to create when, and top it off with a bit of luck, you basically have no chance - while getting those things right basically will make the game feel like a walk in the park. It has an interesting tech tree, a lot of great exploration and building mechanics, resource management is good, but the AI is just really poorly made. Whereas Ascendancy's back in the day needed the Antagonizer mod to not just be a bump on the road, Endless Space's requires you to blindfold and tie its arms behind its back, and even then it feels like it can basically end you in an instant, if it decides to.

This is further exarcerbated by the races being extremely poor at following their designed behavior patterns. Isolationalist races will expand at twice your potentially capable rate, peaceful races will immediately attack you, etc. The war races are the only ones that actually follow their patterns, but then that's because it's seemingly the only actual pattern they've programmed into the game.

A lot of promise, a lot of great potential, beautiful realization, but flawed to the very core, and simply more a study in frustration than actually fun to play.