Senaste recensioner av rog

Great game for veterans and beginners of the Yakuza series; possibly one of the best in the series. Game ran smoothly with no issues on my end. Hopefully this will lead to more of the Yakuza games arriving on PC.

I've played the past two Tomb Raider reboots with very limited experience to the older ones - playing the Tomb Raider 2 demo on the Sampler Disk Vol. 5 for PSX. I ended up completing this game at 97% completion (only missing a handful of collectibles) and on Hard mode AKA One With the Jungle. Unfortunately, Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't stand up with the other two of the reboot trilogy.

[Story]
The story is a very by the numbers adventurer tale; Lara picks up an artifact she shouldn't have, which begins the end of the world. The evil group Trinity catches wind of this, and plans to use it to their advantage. Shenanigans ensue as Lara runs through South America, weaving in and out of Mayan, Incan, and a Christian tomb(s) to save the world before the big bad group uses it for their own advantage.

There's very few recurring characters from the last game, with Jonah from the first and second game being your companion again, and new characters being introduced in a very rushed fashion. The main villains this time around are Dr. Pedro Dominguez, leader of Trinity's High Council, and the military commander for Trinity, Commander Rourke.

Characters seem to just plop in and out of the plot when necessary, you only see Dominguez a handful of times throughout the game and Rourke is only mentioned until over halfway in the game where he just pops out of nowhere and shoots Queen Urunatu, the woman leading the rebellion against Trinity, known as the "Cult of Kulkulkan" in the city of Patiti which she is the ruler of. You don't see Rourke again until the END of the game, which you have a fight with him that is more like a tutorial from a shooter on how to blow up APCs by using gas cans. Outside of a few characters, there's really no development or personality to a lot of the characters in the game.

A lot of the story is just dull and very uninspired - you get your typical tribals who worship the gods and oppose the big evil Trinity, then the ancient tribals who worship them to the point of being feral and unintelligible, you get your "snap into a badass" moment, your flashbacks, etc. Things that have been seen many times before this and done a lot better.

[Gameplay]
I played the game on Hard and only died a few times in combat due to error. You can invest in skills for your bow and arrow which lets you craft specialty arrows - an arrow that infuriates enemies and turns them on others, a lure arrow which emits a beeping noise and poisons whoever gets close, and your regular fire arrow.

If you manage to buy the upgraded rucksack and keep a steady supply of poison, you can clear a large majority of areas with the incredibly OP lure arrow. If you hit any enemy with it (including helmeted ones) at any part of their body, they will die instantly and the arrow will stay there, luring the enemy who finds the body into dying as well due to the arrow going off and poisoning them.

The AI just rushes at you if they're a melee character, has poor aim if they're a ranged character, or just sits there. There's almost no strategy involved in their AI. There's an instance of a Jaguar fight early on in the story and the Jaguar will just run in the corner and let you take free shots at him, ruining any tension that was apart of that scene. The only benefit they have over you is that they're ridiculous bullet sponges at higher difficulties who can take 2-4 point-blank shotgun shots or take 4-5 headshots for their helmets to pop off and take a headshot.

A selling point of the game, the Lara Camoflague System™ just involves going up to a patch of mud and rubbing it on yourself. It only becomes relevant about 70-80% in the game when you are greeted by enemies with thermal vision and will spot you if you're not covered in mud. You wear the mud to confuse their thermal vision which prevents them from seeing you. The only benefit besides that is that it lets you hug mud-covered walls in various areas of the game. It's really not that important.

The challenge tombs, which return from Rise of the TR, are easy and only frustrating due to the climbing that is required in some of them. They're almost all dealing with the rope arrow, or simple mirror puzzles/water puzzles you've seen in many adventure games before this one.

One of my biggest complaints with the game however, is the CLIMBING. It's been a while since I've played the previous Tomb Raiders, but the climbing here is terribly unpolished and the design of the areas don't help either. The camera will jerk itself around when you're climbing to where you're supposed to climb, but since everything ends up looking the same you have no clue where you're actually supposed to jump. If you're backtracking through an area for collectibles, the camera will keep jerking behind you or to the side when you're trying to walk the other way or make a jump. There's no jumping backwards - Lara will just drop off of the ledge if it's not an appropriate way to climb whatever you're trying to climb. The scramble (double tap A) to climb ledges can just stop working at times, same with the axe/grapple input (A and X.) It feels like a complete downgrade from the last games and just feels like a slog to deal with.

As a sidenote, a lot of the collectibles in the game are either murals just describing what a Mayan god is and what they do, a journal of an expedition through the area, or various knick-knacks from people who lived in the area. The murals end up looking all the same and have no real unique features, with Lara describing what is on them through voiceovers instead. The collectibles are just documents/journal entries strewn through a room or city on floors and tables, and are either in the shape of a map or a journal. Lara describes what they say or if they're a sketch she tells you what the sketch is. You can't see the writing or sketches on these objects yourself. The "examine for further information" bits where you rotate the object to find specific writings or whatever to get more info from Lara is completely nonsensical. You can rotate the object to where the writing that is talked about is PERFECTLY seen, and the game still won't acknowledge it as a correct position; it's completely goofy.

[Design]
While I'm not that knowledgable on Mayan/Incan architecture, or the rainforests/jungles of South America, I never imagined these places looking so dull as they do in this game. There's very little color in the jungles with the exception of red/blue from plants to collect or red explosive barrels in some area. The Mayan crypts and tombs really have muted colors of jade, gold, and obsidian - they don't really pop or have any oustanding environments in them besides just a lot of dead people stacked on each other or skeletons everywhere. I didn't feel awed or interested in a lot of the areas due to this blandness.

All this brown and other neutral colors ends up making many platforms look the same, which adds to the confusion of climbing with an already poor climbing system in place. I died multiple times from either jumping at something I thought was where I was supposed to climb, or jumping at something that I assumed was the ledge but was just a destroyed piece of rock or stone that was bulging out from a dilapidated building.

The enemy design is absolutely nothing. There's about five enemy types in the entire game: Animal predators in the form of wolves and jaguars, normal goons who wear t-shirts and pants toting assault rifles, helmeted goons, thermal vision goons with shotguns, and ancient tribals known as the Yaaxil who wear the least amount of armor in the entire game but take the most damage, rushing you with machetes or shooting you with bow and arrows.

Final boss is just your red glowy with the power of the ancients, think Piece of Eden from Ass Creed.

6/10, only buy at a heavy discount

Game feels very inconsistent with its mechanics, which leads to issues when the game wants very quick reflexes on some of the enemies. It wants to represent a run and gun game, but it has an off-center gun and platforming segments that slow the pacing of the level down. It wants to have semi-bullet hell levels, but it has dark projectiles that blend in and objects in the foreground that obscure your view. It looks good, sounds good, and runs well on my PC but it also serves as a distraction when the game requires focus.

You can trade off coins to get more health, but that also reduces your damage and prevents you from getting better weapons; which you're going to need when going through levels where enemies and bosses have more health. You have to collect the coins in each level, which means you're either going to be trying to dodge enemies or unloading bullet after bullet into them.

It's a rather unforgiving game, but I feel it's more unforgiving due to its inconsistent gameplay and less of the enemies themselves. Unlike other games which rely on memorization or mastery of a game's specific control scheme, there's only a few ways you can approach each level and repetitive losses on the same stage just turns montonous. The game draws you in with its unique visuals that set it aside from your typical 8-bit platformer, but shoos you away with its gameplay.

If you're a fan of games that require either memorization of patterns until you can perfect levels or quick reflexes, this might be the game for you; however, the game's controls aren't smooth enough for me and the gameplay doesn't strike me as unique enough to hold my interest. Some may find a better experience with this game than I have.

EDIT: After beating the game on Normal, I still feel the same way; there's 27 "main levels" and about 9 boss rush levels near the end in the entire game, with 6of those being regular run and gun levels and 4-5 being bullet hell airplane sequences. Despite the 1930s aesthetic being unique, the character designs themselves are not very captivating or interesting; usually just a generic character drawn in the 1930s way of having an exaggerated smile or sneer. The stages do get overbearing at some points with the backgrounds and foregrounds, especially in one of the airplane levels near the end. Controls didn't really improve with experience; I still had some times where I struggled with movement or the parrying.

My favorite stages were probably from World 3; I liked Cala Maria, Werner Werman, and Sally Stageplay. World 2 is a very forgettable world.

My least favorite stages were the Phantom Express due to its "parry to move cart" mechanic, and the final boss being rather anticlimactic.

King Dice's theme song is a really good track.

Overall, it's probably not for everybody but if you're interested you should get it at a discounted price of $10 or lower. There's games that do the gameplay better and the design isn't captivating enough to be worth the admission fee - the game's fast pace also doesn't let you appreciate a lot of the graphics due to having to focus on random projectiles and enemies popping out of places.

Only recommended for people who enjoy the somewhat tedious building of other popular early access survival games, have a group of friends who are willing to coordinate with you, and people who enjoy psuedo-realistic warfare (and enjoy hearing people share that tone of voice) like Project Reality, Squad, and so on.

I was thinking this would be more akin to Running with Rifles, with many claiming this is "what Running with Rifles SHOULD have been" despite RwR having the same concept since its 2012 Alpha, but it only shares the similarity in graphics and camera operation. The game is more focused on gathering up resources to sit around hammering away on equipment or going to one of the frontlines and getting into scattered skirmishes.

A solid buy for any Tekken fan, and for a fighting game or casual fan at maybe a discounted cost.

Pros:

• Optimized very well; I get 60 FPS no problem on Ultra with only a drop to 30 at the character select screen.
  
• Roster of 38 characters, with customizable options.
  
• The graphics are crisp and nice to look at, and the stages serve as nice backgrounds without being too intruding.
  
• The Treasure Mode allows you to go through a gauntlet of customized characters in order to get loot boxes.
  
• Any casual can work with combos to get wins in any of the modes, and difficulty settings allow for more or less pressure
  
• Almost little to no loading times in my experience; matches only took a couple of seconds to load.
  
• For any puroresu fan, there's New Japan Pro Wrestling gear as customizable clothing and health bars; however it's centered around Kazuchika Okada with the rest of the NJPW factions (excluding LIJ) getting t-shirts. You also can only use the Rainmaker gear on King.

Cons:

• The story mode wasn't that interesting to me. The pacing is awkward and some of the voice acting is not up to par.
  
• Arcade mode is a fast-paced mode, but a bit underwhelming.
  
• No way to play Versus mode against CPU; it may be fixed later but this is a no-brainer.
  
• There are limits to the customization; you can't use full face masks with hats, and some of the characters share a lot of the same clothing.
  
• Characters don't have individual story modes; only very minor stories that are 1-2 paragraphs of text, a single battle, and a cutscene afterwards.
  
• The singleplayer experience only consists of Arcade, Story, and Treasure. May be disappointing when compared to the minigames of the older games.

The biggest issue of the game is in its current lack of content; updates can fix some of the minor quirks. If you're on the fence about it, it may be best to wait until a discount. If you're a fan of fighting games and the game interests you, it's definitely worth having as your collection.

Overall, I give Tekken 7 a 7.5/10.

I was excited at the prospect of this game due to my interest in police games; I've enjoyed point and click adventures like Police Quest, experienced the action of the SWAT series, loved the atmosphere and story of This is The Police, messed around in the ill-conceived Enforcer: Police Crime Action, and played police mods made for games like the GTA series. I was excited for this game in the beginning, but my excitement slowly waned with each passing day in the game.

Just as a sidenote: I did complete the game and got the "bad ending," which is received from not completing the main story in the time limit of 21 days. I didn't get any of the mafia/crew endings, either.

The story is a simple one: You're a detective on the police force who ended up responding to a robbery at a senator's house, killed a robber in response, and let another one get away with diamonds and another item from the senator's safe. Suspecting you stole the items, you're knocked down to beat cop and relegated to ticketing cars while trying to clear your name. You juggle story actions while trying to keep your department, the mafia, and gangs happy. There's 80s tropes and general humor in the game but it's not enough to be overbearing, but not really enough to make you laugh out loud. It's a lot more focused on going, "Hey, remember this thing from the 80s? It happened!"

The pixel art in this game is very pleasant, giving a nice feeling of a block from 1980s New York. Each storefront is vibrantly colored, each alley looks hostile, and the streets feel alive with people constantly shuffling around, Cars constantly come and go, with most of them being different colors and models to allow for variety. It's not the best I've seen, but it's certainly far from the worst and gets the job done in detailing its environment.

My biggest issue with this game lies in its gameplay. The gameplay is point and click, so it's completely playable with one hand. The gameplay revolves around your police work by doing what your superior tells you to do; mostly ticketing vehicles for faulty tires, lights, or parking violations and meeting your quota.

You may have some days where you have to juggle tickets by tailing and reporting wanted suspects, arresting robbers, arresting wall taggers, and following the main storyline of the game. However, this can get repetitive very quickly; I couldn't play this game in long periods because it would get monotonous very quickly. They pad out 21 days of gameplay (maybe less depending on your actions), with some days where very easy tasks or simply nothing happens besides ticketing. Each day lasts from 9 AM to 5:50 PM, which is about 7-10 minutes in real life time, give or take. If you fail a major mission in any day, you'll be forced to replay the day from the start.

On top of this, I experienced some ridiculous moments in the game where you're ordered to stay in a spot, but maybe walking SLIGHTLY away from the location to ticket a car causes you to fail, another instance where I finished a task just before my shift ended but the radio call didn't trigger in time thus causing me to fail, another glitch that caused the game to freeze my character inside a store which made me restart the game entirely, and various other walking quirks or quirks dealing with ticketing.

However, my biggest complaint with this game regarding its gameplay comes from a single puzzle dealing with the story which COULD be easily patched, but still irked me enough to make me stop playing the game.

There's a story mission that occurs in which you're trying to find a certain item that was stolen from the Senator's house and you have to find a man named Terrance. You're asked to call a man named Yablonsky on Day 16-17 and receive information from him about Terrance. After delivering a package from one store to another which is only 2-3 seconds near each other, they tell you how to find Terrance in a cryptic message: You have to find a specific apartment number that is located on your beat (which covers addresses 601-633,) is related to the number 23 and 27, and is a prime number. The answer ends up being Apartment block 621, and room SIX. The issue here is that SIX IS NOT A PRIME NUMBER, so the game ends up leaving you confused to the point where you're mashing all 10 buttons in each apartment to find Terrance, and you end up finding him through dumb luck and brute forcing.

There's plenty of instances in this game where the dialogue contradicts itself along with general grammartical errors, but this is a huge glaring issue when one of the major story missions lies to you. I didn't bother going on with the story after that point because I had already completed the game once and was not interested in grinding out 6-7 more days just to get another ending.

My final issue is the ending I received, which was the bad ending for not completing the story missions due to this massive mistake. The game ends at the end of your Day 21 beat, and if you do not finish the story missions in time, at the end of your daily checklist you merely get some text that says you didn't complete your case and you're stuck as a beat cop forever. The game then goes to a city skyline that just says "THE END" and cuts to a small newspaper clipping that describes your death while on the beat. The clipping says you die from being SHOT, but then in the same paragraph ends with saying you were STABBED IN THE THROAT while apprehending a suspect and died from bleeding out. You don't get any cinematic or any cutscene for at least playing through the game; just an inconsistent wall of text and "THE END" - granted, this is the bad ending so there's not much to be expected, but I definitely expected more.

While the game isn't the worst I've played, I do feel like my time was a bit wasted and left a sour taste in my mouth due to inconsistent dialogue and glitches forcing me to restart the entire day. I certainly don't think it's worth full price and may be interesting to play at the $5 price range or lower.

After coming out of EA, this is still a fun title that stands on its own apart from Dwarf Fortress.

Let it be known that I am typing up this review immediately after finishing the True Pacifist run of Undertale, This game has left me with mixed feelings, swaying more on the negative side and definitely not living up to the hype and praise that the steam page would have you believe. I don't think it's worth the $9.99 base price tag (or $17.99 if you decide to buy the soundtrack with it). I'm not very good at writing Steam reviews, but I'll just list the pros and cons.

• The soundtrack has some very nice tunes on it which help build atmosphere during some of the battles and areas of the game.
  
  
• A handful of the enemies have unique looks and there are plenty of nice visuals in the game that are appealing to the eye.
  
  
• The battle system is very unique and actually affects the outcomes and choices of the ending or how people in the game view you. You can FIGHT and you can give MERCY in almost every battle in the game.
  
  
• The dialogue and writing in some spots makes you warm up to the characters. This game's strength definitely lies within its writing and dialogue, with the gameplay taking a backseat.
  
  
• This game does have a knack with the developer thinking of a lot of things, such as changes in the game's code resulting in different things happening, saving/reloading getting different dialog options, and plenty of other secrets.
  
  
• The game has multiple endings with very different results.

• I know this has been said numerous times before, but the humor in this game gets really dry and grinding at some points, and while that is the point of some of the characters in the game, this still doesn't take away from the humor putting one off or taking them out of the situation at hand. There's a lot of puns and random humor that gets hammered in a lot, While this game does have plenty of similarities to Earthbound, Earthbound's humor is a lot more timeless due to the references it makes while this game also depends on a lot of internet memes that will be irrelevant or stale in a couple of years or months.
  
  
• You have to be absolutely involved with about 5-6 of the characters in this game, with some of them having the very lousy humor that I stated above. This might make you turn off from the game immediately or later into the game due to this because even I had a hard time feeling for these characters nearing the end of the game as they started popping out cheap one-liners, puns, or just general stuff that felt a little too wooden or off-base for their characters at the time.
  
  
• The gameplay segments of the game consists of puzzles and minigames. The puzzles are rather easy and seem more like tacked-on roadblocks in the game in an attempt to give it more gameplay than being challenging. The only time I had trouble with a puzzle is when I may have accidentally walked past the solution or stepped on the wrong block. The battle segments are more in the vein of Warioware, The Impossible Game, or other flash games that require quick timing and jumps from segment to segment. An attack consists of hitting the "sweet spot" in the middle of the screen by timing it correctly, while a defense is usually a bullet hell or reflexes segment. This may not be hard for a couple of people, but it does get boring when it starts doing the same one or two bullet hell tricks over and over in a boss that may take 10+ turns to pacify. This can also be frustrating when there's a specific sequence of actions you must do to pacify a monster, or when the game intentionally has you attack the monster, which you have never done up to this point in a pacifist run, and spare it afterwards in battle or have it lead into a cutscene.
  
  
• If you get the best ending in the game, there's basically no replay value after this point because the game has a sequence upon starting up afterwards that involves one of the characters in the game pleading you not to start the game over because the characters you've saved are enjoying their new lives in the ending you've created for the characters. This explanation is very nice depending on how captivated you were by the game, but ultimately disappointing if you were expecting more on a second play through. Those who pursue a second playthrough may also be disappointed in what happens if they experiment, though... Your mileage may vary on how you feel about this.
  
  
• This game is inspired obviously by Earthbound and Mother 3, with this game's creator actually having created his own Earthbound ROM hack. This is good and all, but at some points it tries VERY VERY hard at some points to be similar to Earthbound and Mother 3 in its areas and character behavior when it lacks the charm, characters to relate to, clever dialogue, and extended character development to live up to it. The scenes leading up to the end and the final bosses themselves really give off this vibe when compared to EB and M3. After playing this game, it really just wanted me to go back and play Earthbound or Mother 3 instead. These characters just didn't give me the same feelings that the MOTHER characters did.
  
  
• The game's focuses a lot on the relationship between your human character and the monsters, but swerves a bit from side to side on what you're supposed to be focusing on in the story, especially when the "true ending" requires you to go through and complete whatever you may have missed that might actually be considered "side stories" in other games. There's a handful of distractions in your journey that seem a bit unnecessary when your character's intended goal is to get back home with the human world.
  
  
• A minor note is that the game does have a couple of mandatory scenes that have rapidly moving and flashing lights, one example involving a "randomized" puzzle that rapidly flashes between green, red, purple, orange, blue, yellow, and pink while shuffling the colors for the puzzle. There also may be some disturbing imagery in the game that is unavoidable when this game is being touted as a "game for all ages."
  
  
  Overview
  In all, at this price and with some specific issues with the game, I can not recommend it to everybody or even a large majority of Steam users. It lacks charm or visuals that lower-priced games or larger-scale games have and some people may feel like they were cheated out of their money and time. Maybe I was a little too bought in with the hype of this game being a massive Mother 3 and Earthbound fan, but I don't think it's worthy of all the praise that it's getting. It's a nice and cozy RPG that would do its job well at a lower price, but I don't think it's fit to be considered a "perfect game" when there's not a lot of game play to it in the first place. If this goes on sale at a discount, I'd recommend picking it up and trying it out to see if it's worth your time. For now, I wouldn't recommend it. The time I put into this game could have definitely been of more benefit in playing Space Funeral, the MOTHER series, and plenty of others.
  
  Also, in an attempt to try and put this in the nicest way possible while failing to do so, I have to mention that the creator Toby Fox comes off as a bit pretentious from activity on social media. While I don't know him in real life and know that the 128 character limit or whatever Twitter has can not show a person's whole feelings... It seems he's very opposed to criticism, whether it be legitimate or less than legitimate. UNDERTALE's success has given him somewhat of a big head, but I hope it doesn't result in some breakdown or egotistical attitude that we've seen from other indie success stories.

A great top-down shooter that went from just having 2 maps and quite a bit of bugs in the alpha to now a full release. You're going to get your ♥♥♥♥ kicked in, you're going to die a lot, but you'll definitely have fun. Starting a singleplayer campaign is a treat in itself and multiplayer only adds on to that. You'll go from having comfortable rushes and sweeping out entire areas to HOLDING A BRIDGE AT A STALEMATE FOR AN HOUR. A great game to pick up and play and highly addicting. Adding a level editor and workshop mod support for historical battles, fictional battles, or just anything that comes to mind with Steam Workshop would make this even better.

I became William the Conqueror and took over England, ruling with an iron fist.
I had multiple lovers and was feared as a brave warrior.
I only had two illnesses that went away shortly, and was only injured once.
I had a large army at my disposal that helped me claim the Holy Roman Empire.
I had numerous Popes killed just because I felt like it.
I had over 20 kids with one woman.
I planned to take rest of the Kingdom of France, but a 16 year old Princess stood in my way.
I failed an assassination on the Princess.
The Princess didn't fail the assassination on me.

The 60 year old Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, King of England, and soon-to-be King of France was killed by a 16 year old girl.

I also married my 16 year old daughter and had 5 kids.

420/10 will rule again.