Recent reviews by rog

this game cured my gambling problem by helping me learn how to play poker

none of the characters in this are hotter than grendel from warframe

I had about three different playthroughs with my first being a Grifter class that I thought didn't really fit into the Merchant Guild, so I went to the Thieves Guild instead and was able to pass the first questline until running into constant stealth and agility checks afterwards, causing me to restart.

The second time I decided to go full-on praetor and go into combat, but the combat was slow, dull, and I was missing a lot of the plot I was interested in, causing me to restart.

The third and final playthrough was an actual merchant, in which I found out that the Merchant's Guild is even scummier than the Thieves Guild (so my original Grifter character would've fit perfectly,) and ended up beating the game with a pretty unsatisfying ending.

This is probably the most I've had to save scum in a CRPG since the dialogue comprises of specific checks on skills (Speech, Haggling, etc.) before usually kneecapping you from progress by throwing in another skill or an Attribute check (Charisma, Strength, etc,) along with either teleporting you to the next scene immediately and not giving you a sufficient amount of choice to rely on your skills or resort to combat out of desperation.

The response I've usually seen in regards to a complaint like this are just offering specific builds from other players or the developer, but what's the point of character creation if it's just all or nothing or having to depend on guides anyways? It would've been more efficient to just give pre-made backgrounds and classes and let the story play out based on the character's choices and not on constant, specific skill checks.

Palm City is interesting to look at both in the day and night, but isn't really that interesting to race. Like a lot of open world racing games, the races become stale after a while as you're going to be driving over familiar routes with little to no surprises or setpieces added for the sake of the race.

The police chase mechanic starts out interesting enough, but the lack of offensive abilities at higher heat levels means you have to look up areas and guides to exploit the AI by taking jumps, diving in the water, or just getting lucky otherwise your supercar will be caught up to by an SUV and Crown Vic easily, and sent into a barrel roll on the slightest tap of your car. There's no pursuit breakers, hiding spots, they're too resilient to be rammed outright at higher heat levels, and cannot usually be tricked by weaving through traffic or taking sharp corners.

I ended up not finishing due to these two factors, despite liking the customization features and the overall feel of the game despite it being a little simple with its drift mechanics. There's just not enough interesting content here, and what's here is a mixed bag.

I remember why I stopped playing this the first time I tried it through a friend on Battle.net, as the common complaints are ones I echo as well: the game is in such an awkward state of having polish and some fun design, but it's completely marred by its difficulty, long levels, and tendency to also repeat levels for the sake of padding completion and content that it really doesn't know what audience it wants to be for. The difficulty here is head and shoulders above the older Crash games in terms of just basic gem collecting, so it has issues appealing to the older audience who grew up with the PS1 versions (I've played Crash since the original on PS1, but dropped off during the PS2 era and beyond,) and any new fans who hopped on through the N. Sane Trilogy have a different sense of physics from that game alongside less experience than veterans of the franchise, so you're just stuck with a game that is too hard to 100% complete for even most veteran Crash fans, and a game that can get too frustrating to complete even the main story for casual and older fans.

Outside of the general difficulty and length of the levels, there's also just cheap tricks like obscuring crates off-screen and really making some of the hidden gems require odd efforts that can make even singular level completion a chore. It doesn't feel rewarding and feels more like busywork to get these gems, and the levels increasingly give that "thank God it's over" feeling instead of leaving you with wanting to play more and more.

Look in the Guides section/Google for the Ultimate mod and 60 FPS patch, as well as using Steam's Input layout function for an easy way to map controls to your controller. That's what I used.

I think this is a fun little racing game that flew under the radar but has recently gained more attention alongside Blur as one of those underrated and underrepresented racing games of that era. The reality show presentation is somewhat unique, and the gimmick of using "power plays" and shortcuts by expending your meter gained through drifting and drafting is also a unique concept, but overall the racing gets somewhat bland quickly and - if you're aiming for gold in every race - can get unfair due to the rubberbanding AI. Some tracks have more power plays available than others, and the game really needed a nitrous/boost feature or some other way to catch up rather than depending on the track to do the work for you.

I didn't end up finishing it because the racing is a little too dry and simple for me despite the bombastic presentation, but it's fun to play for a few hours or play as a break away from a larger game you're working on.

If you get it discounted, this is a fun enough looter shooter - I've played up to World Tier 5 and completed the Warlords of New York solo, and i was satisfied with what I paid for. The story is bland and forgettable, but if you enjoy just doing some shooting and looting through some interesting urban setpieces, especially with friends, you'll probably have some fun.

The crashing wasn't a big issue for me, only having about 2-4 crashes while playing through the main campaign and Warlords, and usually they were back-to-back crashes before the game ran fine for another 10-15 hours without issues. However, after trying The Summit, the game was crashing consistently - by that time, I had my fill of the game and was fine with putting it down.

If you liked the original, odds are you'll like this one if you find Miles to be an interesting enough character. I wouldn't recommend it at all for $40-50 since it is about 12-15 hours of content to truly 100% everything (including getting through intro missions again in NG+ to unlock NG+ gated abilities and suits.) A lot of stuff here is recycled from the base game: the Raft prisoners are now reskinned into the new faction known as Underground, and the new security forces for Roxxon are just red Sable International members, along with the construction site gauntlets being here, warehouse raids becoming research bases, souvenirs from Miles' life pre-Spiderman similar to Peter's souvenirs, Screwball challenges are now Hologram Peter challenges, and the map of New York is (unsurprisingly) the same, now with a layer of snow and Christmas decorations hung up. Miles has a much more limited gadget set but has Venom Powers that utilize electricity and make his moveset more powerful/faster than Peter, but it still plays similarly.

I just really hope that Insomniac finds writers/designers who can add more interesting flavor to the overall plot and open world for the sequel, and ports over more games with this same performance.

I like the visual style and general gameplay idea of this game, but the game ramps up in difficulty where it becomes less about being able to do cool, stylish things in motion to keep the momentum and instead sitting a lot of time in the bullet time mode, jumping from end to end of the map to chase down teleporting enemies, dealing with glitchy snipers that only leave you a millisecond of perfect dodge time before you get shot, combos broken up by awkwardly bumping into walls and falling into pits in the stage, and just spamming tricks in order to reload your weapons against increasingly spongy enemies.

If you're really interested in the concept, I'd wait for a discount after watching some gameplay videos of some of the later levels to understand what you're getting into.

I've 100%'d the game on Spectacular and currently going through the DLC, and I recommend this when it's discounted unless you're a huge Spider-Man fan. It's a GOOD opening game from Insomniac, with the combat being snappy and acrobatic and the swinging being so fast and entertaining that I barely used the game's fast travel system, but it does have its share of issues that keep it from being great - mainly in the side mission department. Almost all of the side missions are just forgettable filler, either falling into collectibles, small skirmishes with enemy groups, or challenges. There's only about 3-4 missions that actually have their own contained little story and meaningful, new content in them. The writing for the main story is good, albeit rushed towards the end as they try to cram in multiple "epic" moments and as much setup as possible for the final act/next game.

The DLC is pretty mediocre however, feeling more like it should've filled in parts of the base game as a series of side missions instead of being a 3 part episodic mission. The writing itself is also pretty bad: Peter looks like an absolute gullible idiot through most of it in both the side missions and the main story, and they decide to bring back even more filler side missions by introducing escort missions and focusing on Screwball, an annoying blogging/streamer villain that doesn't get any proper comeuppance for how miserable she is to listen to.

As for performance of the PC port, I played mostly on Very High-High settings and only had a couple of frame hiccups during some of the more busier scenes. Out of the previous Sony games I've played ported to PC: Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone, this one definitely runs the best out of the 3.