Recent reviews by Ryu_Sheng

I like this game, a lot. It's significantly better than BL3 and is on par with BL2 for me. Whats more the open world aspect just adds to the game.

The gun play is just as satisfying as it always has been, the gun variety is just as amazing as previous games. Claptrap is just as annoying, and the story is just as brain dumb. All of this is what makes the franchise so dang fun!

However there are a couple of minor issues, and one catastrophic problem that is the cause of the negative review.

So, minor first.

Health drops seem to be almost none existen for the most part in boss fights. THen for some unknown reason i get spammed with loads of drops in the open world. It's frustrating and irritating. In the end i got fed up and used a god mode cheat for some of the boss fights. I also noticed that for me, no chests, cans etc have health drops in them, only ammo or now and again weapons and shields.

Compilinmg shaders. THis is by far the most annoying. When you launch the game the it compiles shaders. The first time it took in insane amount of time, like 5mins. Thankfully after that it takes around 30-60seconds. However when you actually launch a save, it compiles shaders AGAIN and takes in excess of 2 minutes, sometimes even longer.

Howerver the most frustrating issues is UE5. People with insane builds with 5090's and other high end parts cant run the game properly. My laptop isnt high end, runs a 4070, i9, and 32gb ram. Im lucky to get 20fps on low. It stutters and splutters and end up pretty much unplayable after an hour or so.

Edit: Thanks to Rahza in the comments I've now moved to FSR and frame gen which meant i was able to move upto Medium and get 60FPS

This is not a borderlands issue (per say) it's the fact that UE5 is dog sit engine that is to over engineered and shouldnt really be used for any game at the moment. So far every UE5 game ive seen or tried has these same issues.

That said it plays pretty good on Gefore Now, getting around 100fps. So yeah....

I was very sceptical over this app initially. I came to it from a youtube vid and frankly i always trust those with a bucket of salt.

I was looking for something that could improve my gameplay on my Legion Go, and pretty much every video i saw said this was it. So, given it's cheap cost, i decided to take a gamble; a gamble that has paid off big time.

All most all of the games ive used it with have played flawlessly and been buttery smooth. This was especially so with Euro Truck Sim 2, which had been playable, but janky at times. Using lossless scaling brought the game from a janky 45-65 fps, to around 90-120fps and it it longer sputters.

Miasma Chronicles also had a similar experience. Run natively the game had to be run at 700p on my Go with around 24-30fps. With the Lossless Scaling i was able to increase it to 900p and keep it over 60fps.

The biggest surprise for me was the recently released Stellar Blade, which was pretty much unplayable natively. With some in game tweaks, and Lossless Scaling running it run pretty good and was able to increase things to medium.

For a on the go device i honestly think this is a must have app.

I have also found this works wonders on my gaming laptop. I've a MSI Titan with an i9, 32gb ram and a 4070. Hardly top of the line model, but good enough that its played everything ive thrown at it on high in 1600p with no issues. However Stellar Blade is unplayable, due to the 4070 only have 6gb of vram.

Using Lossless Scaling has absolutely made an impact on the game and made it atleast playable, though not as good as on my handheld.

HOWEVER. I must state that its not perfect, infact with a couple of games its actually making the game significantly worse. For example, Shadow Gambit. While it seems to be wroking as intended, it reduces movement to a snails pace. it was actually kind of funny to watch, but completely unplayable. I have thus far found 3 games (out of several hundered ive tried) where this happens, or something similar.

So i have now just finished the entire campaign so figure it's time to write my thoughts.

Let me preface this with a quick word of caution. While you can (and i have) complete everything solo, there is NO offline mode, and very unlikely to ever be one. So when the servers inevitably get turned off this will be a dead game.

Now, TLDR: The game was hella fun, a few insignificant bugs, but near 30h of glorius fun, all for £16.

I bought this originally on epic when it first came out, and back then the game was hot garbage. Picked it up in the recent sale for like £16 for everything and i do not regret it.

Story: Would love to say it was world class epic scifi, but it isnt. It's a fairly standard story. However with an aspect i found refreshing, no romance. It's a game about blowing s**t up and thats it. Blooming awesome.

The writing is fairly solid, and i have to admit i found i was happy to watch the cut scenes and enjoy the story as it played out. I liked the characters for the most part, and for the first time in a while i got the ending wrong. Though that could be just because the dev's werent able to do the next DLC.

Gameplay: I personally enjoyed the gunplay, though i do with there were actual melee weapons. I also personally didnt really like the design of the legendary weapons. Walking around with tentacles or bones jutting out everywhere just didnt really fit the setting imo.

Other than that its pretty standard 3rd person cover shooter.

Skills: Personally i bearly used them. I found them 'meh' and unintersting (on my pyromancer atleast). I did use the interupt/knockback a lot as most of the mobs are agile close combat ones. What i found myself doing instead was modding ther weapons with skills that fit well with my playstyle. Which was awesome fun.

I loved that you had skins, though would have liked a way to set a partular look as default.

Overal it has been an amazing game to playthrough and goes on to my list of completed games (which atm has less than 50 games on it lol). It also goes on the list of games i'll keep installed and play again with a different class and build.

Well worth its sale price imo

Edit: So reading some of the reviews and they harp on about the game being woke, especially later. Hell no! Game is not woke just because it has a strong female character. Yes you have a diverse 'crew' but that dosent make it woke. Woke is when its forced and makes no sense in the scope of the story. Everything here does make sense and fits well.

Hell if anything you could make the claim it's a patriarchy game because of the late game. You'd be wrong, but it would still be a better claim than the game is woke lol

This game is having a rough start, no doubt about it. Yet for me it's still a shining example of amazing game design.

The sony drama. Unlike Hell Divers 2 which got sony the thrashing it deserved for a bait and switch. This game from the outset has been clear that it would require a PSN account for online play. So whining about it isnt going to do anything. As for those countries that are GeoBlocked, since PSN is NOT in your area deal with it. I wish PSN was everywhere, but it's not and its upto Sony to decide where they want to operate. Sucks but thats life.

Now, onto the port.

Sadly it's a bit of a hit and miss port. Once you get it working the game runs really well, but its also overly demanding for what it's doing.

I have however now got it running on both my laptop and Legion Go. To get it running try this:

Find the .exe in the steamapps folder and right click > Properties > Compatibility and set win8 compatibility. Also toggle: Disable full screen optermisations.

Then in the Launcher make sure you turn OFF the frame generation, as this is breaking the game hard and locking up systems requiring a hard reset.

Make sure your in Fullscreen mode, as borderless/exclusive is crashing every few minutes.

After these changes i've been able to play for a 3 hours without any problems.

Once thats all done enjoy the amazing story and visuals. Also, in a surprise to me, the english dub for this has thus far been pretty darn amazing. Had this on both Ps4 and PS5 and never tried the english dub lol Shame because it's really good!

TLDR: The game is ok. Not great, not bad, but middle of the road. AND THATS OK!! That said, wait for a good chunk of updates before buying.

Honestly the first few hours of playing this game are fun. You get a few nodes close to you so you can start to get your factory up and running. And the initial time is kind of fun, though i do find the Oz AI to be annoying. It's a stereotype and usually those dont bother me, however i have a few friend from oz, and thus it annoys me.

However there are some issues with the game, and i don't really see how they can be resolved.

The mining is a pain, because the nodes disappear. So this means you just start to get things going smoothly, and bam your node is out and you have to rip everything down and move. Which wouldnt be too bad, except on all the maps ive played thus far the next nodes were etiher burried deep underground, under water, or miles away.
making for a lot of wasted time and frustrations.

Research. Another annoyance. Rather than focusing on getting you to the tech you need as efficiently as possible, you get a load of cosmetic unlocks. Furniture and stuff that frankly is wasted research wher ethey are. I want to build and stabalise my factory before i worry about how it looks. Especially given the above issue of having to move every few hours.

I'm giving it a negative review for now based on how the game is right now. Honestly i'd rather a neutral stance. However i cant give it a positive review based on how im done after 15h and probably wont play again till some updates. And that there is my final stance. The game has the potential to be good, but for now wait on some updates.

It's times like this where i wish steam allowed for a neutral stance, because it means im giving this game a negative review, which feels a bit unfair. However i couldnt in all honesty give it a positive review either.

Now, this game does a lot of things right, but it also makes a few humdinger mistakes.

Lets talk about what i found good first.

Performance. This honestly surprised me. I play on Legion Go handheld for the most part, and while i have to run at 1600x1000 on medium, i still get an almost locked out 60fps. When you move into a new area it drops to around 30-35fps for few seconds, but then jumps back to 60.


The setting:

Honestly the setting is for the most part one of the most interesting ones i've played for a long time. I loved flitting around the different time lines to do stuff. In a crude way it reminded me of the Dishonored 2 time mechanic, only more janky and not as fun. Despite that though it was still intersting enough to keep me playing. Along with the portals to other areas and times. Sure it's nothing really special, but it was implemented and used in a way that made it satisfying.

The Classes:

Honestly, this was the one and only area where this game trounced Diablo 4. All of the classes were fun to play, and more importantly, were HELLA fun to play! Honestly no matter what class i played i got into them and had fun. This was especially true with the skill system, and the way you could expertise and make a skill your own. For example i came accros a unique mace that had a 26% chance of casting spreading flames, which pretty much would wipe out groups. i was able to turn my skill, which was a pure physical skill, into a burning skill, and when further speciallised it combined with the mace skills and made me a walking fire god. Was amazing fun!!

The various classes all have several routes you can go with and it genuinely feels like it's 'your' class. It was very immersive, and a satisfying....for a while. More on that in the down side below.

Sadly, thats where the good stuff ends. Now lets talk about the 'meh' stuff.

Controller support. It has it, which is a step in the right direction, but my god is it janky AF. You can not rebind the A button for some reason, and the way it's implemented looks weird on the UI. Whats more they're using some weird auto targeting to help you out with controllers. However it never really works right, for example if your surrounded by low level zombies and the flying critter that summons them. For some reason the auto target decides to target the zombies, and getting it to targert the flying summoner is a battle in and of itself.

Sadly it gets frustrating, battling the on screen enemies, and the secret enemy that is the auto target.

The loot. URGH. Why do all ARPG's have the same issue when it comes to loot, they dont seem to learn from each other. THe loot in this game are frankly, garbage. I went from level 12 to level 45 with the same sword because EVERYTHING that dropped for me was hot garbage. Now yes, i'd 'built' the sword using the crafting system, but even so going that many levels without a real upgrade was depressing.

The loot filter. Let me be blunt, if you have to use a loot filter to see the loot you need or want to see, then you F'ed up. Last Epoch takes that to a whole other level. There are youtube videos over an hour long going into the complexities of the filter system, and it's still confusing AF. The sad thing is though YOU have to use filters because 99% of the loot that drops is pure garbage and isnt even worth taking for selling because it's only worth a coins.

The crafting. No explanation, no tutorial, no nothing, just a "go use the armoury" and that was it. No explanations or anything. And while you can mostly figure it out, it would be nice to have a proper explanation from the game.

The story. The story itself is disjointed, has holes so wide you can drive a truck though. And frankly so badly voice acted that whenever someone spoke i was cringing and space baring thorugh as fast as possible to get past it. I gave up with the story in the end, which is just as well given the 'ending' and i use that term loose as possible.

Microtransactions. Or imo NOT so micro. The people whine about the cosmetics in D$ being expensive (and they are) but seem to give the dev's here a pass. When in fact IMO the dev's here have made things worse. D4 at least allows you get cosmetics for EVERYTHING in game. However here (thus far atleast, after over 30h), all cosmetics have to be bought with cash. Want a cloak, go pay for it. Want a pet, or new look, go pay for it. Whats even worse is that these cosmetics are only available if your playing online.I dont mind paying for cosmetics, but NOTHING should be locked behind a pay wall. (Though to be honest, for the most part the cosmetics are pretty trash)

Dev's dont respect your time. This for me is one of the worst. The maps are pretty large, and frankly exploring is fun. However i no longer bother exploring because it feels like a waste of time. You do occassionally come accross the odd chest, but it will only have a few coins and a load of trash items. Whats more if you teleport out for whatever reason, when you come back the map is 100% reset and your exploration is wiped out. Not good! Also if you left some items behind while you went to vendor your trash (ARPG staple there) well guess what, not only is the map reset, mobs respawned, but all that loot you left behind is gone!

So, after all that, no i dont recommend the game. If it goes on a 50% off sale then sure pick it up, because i have had some fun. But it's not worth its asking price, i certainly don't reccomend the deluxe ot ultimate editions.

Hogwarts Legacy is potentially my GOTY, having a lot of fun playing it through.

Graphically, even on lower settings it's a beautiful game. By far one of the most visually stunning games I've seen.

VA work is sadly not as good being a bit hit and miss. Sirona the trans barkeep is just terrible. What's worse is that it was done as clear pandering, as all the other languages she's voiced by women.

A few other characters are also a bit meh, but none really grating on the ears.

The music is pretty par for this type of game. Nothing overly spectacular but nothing cringe worthy.

Story, again pretty par for a Harry Potter story. I enjoyed it, but there were no moments of being blown away. It's a solid story, but nothing special.

I do however wish the leveling up was more open. They male it clear early on the only way to really get EXP is from the story missions, which sadly means there's no real reward for exploration.

Also regrettably there's no replay ability to the game, its a one and done. Even playing through as different houses doesn't make major changes.

I Hope they do some dlc that expands past the story, though not really sure how that would work. I would like to see either a update or something that would make the classes more interactive, and add some coop.

I've just now submited a refund request on this game, and it's a great shame!

There are a lot of minor niggling issues with the game, issues that it's big brother, XCOM 2, has as well. THese range from wanton pointless violence, and the abysmal magic eyes that allows people to shoot through walls.

The first, is weird. This is a stealth game, where your not trying to bring attention to yourself. So jumping through and breaking windows, isnt exactly what you'd expect your character to do. Especially when there's a perfectly fine, and open, door next to you.

The second is just frustrating. Being able to see through walls, and shoot through them as though they're not there, just breaks the game. Thankfully (or not) this applies both to your guys and the AI ones.

However, these arent what caused me to request a refund. As i said these are niggling issues, and are common to the genre. However in the space of 10 minutes i had the game crash 3 times, and now it wont launch at all. It opens up and imediatly crashes. Tried everything i can think of, to no avail. In the end i've given up, spending 3 hours to get a game ot work is not my idea of a fun time!

My advice is to wait for a few patches to be out and the game to be more stable. As it stands now there's just to many issues with its performance and stability

I've played a little over an hour now, and saddly im unlikely to play anymore.

ARPG's, for me atleast, need one element more than anything else: Loot, and lots of it.

Sadly, in the time i've played this game i've had exactly 3 bits of loot drop and thats it. Killed a lot of trash and a couple of mini bosses and then a series of crashes that lead me to here.

I'm a 40k fan, so i can give this game huge props for making it feel right, but at the same time as an ARPG it fails on so many levels for me. But even with that, i think i'd still have kept the game, but after an hour of play i had 5 crashes in a row and the last one seems to have killed the save. For me this is a big NO NO NO, so sadly refunded.

I might pick it up near xmas if it's had some patches, but this still feels like an early access title! I also don't like the forced online play, even for single player.

I love my Visual Novels, I’m a huge fan of the genre and part of me was happy to see more and more games being released on Steam. However the good ones seem to get crushed under the deluge of cheap crap.

When I received an email asking me to check out this new one from MyDearest, learning it was only a few quid (£5.99) and this was their first game, part of my soul died. However it’s a VN, and I can’t resist the urge even if I know it’s gonna rip a bit of my heart out.

So colour me surprised when I found this one was actually a really solid VN, with only a bit of fanservice, mostly enjoyable characters, and a decent (if cliched) story.

If you want my TL:DR recommendation, if you’re into VN’s give this one a whirl!

I’ve decided to split this review into two sections so I can address certain things. This first part will cover the game and MyDearest. Where as the second will cover Lapin Inc who did the localisation. But for now lets get started on the game.

Visual Novels live or die on two things, music and visuals. Given the games are generally static the music has to be top notch, in synch with the story, and not overpowering. Graphically the game has to look amazing. Everything from character art to back drops has to be perfect. If these aren’t right it can kill the game, as people wont read a VN that looks ugly, or has annoying music.

Thankfully, School of Talent succeeds on this front, to a degree. The music for this game is gawd damn awesome, and if they don’t release the music as a DLC OST I’ll be greatly disappointed. Not to mention wondering if they’re not interested in extra money!

Admittedly there’s not a lot of songs in this game, but everytime one came up I would stop and just listen. They were so good they actually made me interested in listening to the whole thing, something I usually don’t bother with.

The sound effects ranged from being great to meh, with most of them being in the good to great range, though there were a few that left me wondering why they choose such an odd sound, especially since it didn’t fit in with setting and what the sound was supposed to sound like.

However on the whole this was a good mix and helped to drive the story along well.

Visually, the game looks awesome, can’t and wont deny that. The characters are well drawn, looked amazing, and fit well with the personalities of the characters, bar one (who I’ll talk about later on). Even the settings and back drops were pretty decent, and in truth the only complaint I had was lack of variety. As the game progressed you’d be seeing more and more of the same backdrops, as well as even the same character art
I could forgive the back drops repeating, but for me the repeated character art was a big minus. Especially true since sometimes the character panel used didn’t really fit with what was being said, it was a bit immersion breaking. That said though, it’s hard to criticise it to much given the cost of the game. Character art isn’t cheap to have done, and adding more variety there might have bumped the price to high.

The big question though is: How is the story?

Good question, and the answer (for me) is, it’s an average story. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as a lot of the cheap VN's on steam these days. Sure it’s cliched, but it’s a VN, so you go in expecting cliches to be thick and heavy.

Sadly though, my complaint with the story is that it’s to fast in the wrong places, and then tediously slow in the other wrong places. Lets take the start of the game for example, it starts off with a bit of nice pacing, setting the stage and introducing the theme of the story very well. It does such a good job of setting the stage and then it screeches to a jarring halt and jumps 1.5 years. This was a huge immersion breaker for me. Time jumps aren’t an issue, and are a frequently used tool, but its how the jump is handled thats key. In this case the jump is done very badly.

Whats more the game established from the outset a big key point about the main character, which you expect to have something important in the story. But it’s only ever used as a bat to condem the character. In fact there was no reason for the characters history, and even at the end of the game I was left wondering why it was made such a big thing over (so damn hard to write this without spoilers lol!!)

The story itself is decent, and was enjoyable to read through, no denying that! However, I found I really didn’t like Suzu, I found her totally one dimensional for most of the story. While it’s certainly true she’s meant to have a bit of a personality issue, due to her childhood, I just felt what we were getting was flat and dull. By the time she’d actually started to change and become interesting the story was over half way done, and she couldn’t recover (in my mind). While she ends up with a good character personality, and actually did make me feel sympathy for her, she doesn’t come close to other characters.

For me the best character in the game was Mayu, with her stalker/masochist personality and the way she goes after the protagonist. I found her to be funny, and enjoyable, though her character art didn’t really fit. Towards the end of the game its commented on how she’s got big boobs, but throughout the game she’s always portrayed as having, what I’d call normal sized boobs for her size. It’s a bit disjointed, and thinking back on some of the comments in the story it would have made sense for to have bigger boobs. That said, she’s still by far the best character in the game!

Overall, I feel the story is decent, and enjoyable to read through. Especially with the supporting characters adding a lot of flavour to Suzu’s initial bland start.

However, it is worth noting (if this is important to you) that the game has no story choices. In fact the single choice you get is a dream where you get to see nothing, and it has no effect on the story. Frankly it would have been better without it, but I understand the reason for it, but I personally wouldn’t have it there. So yeah, this is essentially a pure novel, and while the game is called ‘Suzu Route’, there’s no decisions to be made.

I’m guessing they couldn't afford to do a full game where you got to decide which girl you wanted to go after, so have split it up into chapters with each girl getting their own short game. Hopefully when it’s all done they can then merge them into a single big game where choices occur and matter.

Finally, lets talk game length, it’s not long. For me I played through in around 80minutes. I’ve seen some play throughs though as low as 50minutes.


Now, onto Lapin Inc. Lapin did the english localisation (and maybe the others?), and frankly these guys should be ashamed of themselves. According to the blurb for their company:

Located in Tokyo, Lapin has been around for over 25 years, and until recently had focused on localization of English-language novels into Japanese. Now, we have begun applying our localization expertise to the video game industry, starting with love simulation games for iOS and Android.

So you’d expect a company with 25 years experience to be pretty good at their job wouldn’t you. Frankly they’re garbage, when I was playing through initially I was wondering if MyDearest had done it themselves, which would account for some of the mistakes being made.

Learning it was done by an outside company I have to ask what the hell were these guys doing? The game is littered with untranslated sections, the odd word and lot more names. Then there’s the puntuation and spelling mistakes that were so bad even I noticed them. For a company with supposedly 25 years in the industry this is abysmal. They need to work on a patch to fix these iss