Recent reviews by Sammy the Wizard

While The Last of Us Part II Remastered may not be as good as its predecessor, it is still phenomenal and an easy recommendation. From my memory, the first game, which I did not play until it came to Steam in the form of a remake a few years ago, had better story, better characters, better pacing, and better graphics. However, the first game set an exceptionally high bar, so saying this game falls short in a lot of ways isn’t exactly a knock against it. The Last of Us Part II still manages to tell one of the most compelling and engaging stories I’ve seen, while making some nice gameplay improvements over the first

Throughout my review I’m going to try not to spoil anything and use spoiler tags where I feel they are needed, but this is a game that’s really hard to talk about without saying things that some may view as spoilers, so while I will use spoiler tags where I feel they are necessary, if you want to go in completely blind as I would recommend, I suggest you stop reading my review now and know that I do highly recommend this game.

The Last of Us Part II is divided into 3 parts. You’ll know when you get to the second and third parts. In the first part, which took me about 16 hours, you play as Ellie from the first game. I say “about” 16 hours, because I was so engrossed in the game I forgot to write down an exact time stamp. Some years have passed since the first game and she’s older now. I enjoyed playing as her because I like her character, but they definitely fell into something I see a lot of sequels do where they make characters more aggressive, confrontational, and give them other negative traits seemingly just to create drama and lead them down a solo path. I’m never a fan of this, but it felt worse in this game due to the character driven nature of the first one. Part of what made the first game so good was the constant dialog and interaction between Ellie and Joel, but for many parts of this game, Ellie is alone. Even without that though, the first game keeps introducing new interesting characters that Joel and Ellie interact with for parts of their journey. That felt completely gone from this part. It ended up being a really weird experience. It often felt like Ellie was just wandering around somewhat aimlessly without any character interactions to drive the plot, until a random flashback would happen and develop characters and story. At times this made me feel like it was dragging on a bit, but I still found myself very engaged and wanting to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, this also meant that when characters get killed, as Naughty Dog seems to really enjoy doing, there isn’t any emotional attachment to make it feel anything.

Eventually, you get to the second part, which, in an as spoiler free way as I can say it, makes you play the whole game again, but from a different characters perspective. This part wasn’t as long taking only about 10 hours, which I again say “about” since I was still so engrossed in the game that I forgot to make note of my playtime, but I would say this is a testament to how engaging this game’s story is. Normally I really like seeing stories from different perspectives, but the character they choose is someone who had almost no interaction with Ellie or her friends for most of the story and at first I was worried that it would end up feeling like one of those bad TV specials where they give a minor character an episode that adds almost nothing to the plot and feels very out of place, except much longer. While it was true that this other perspective felt a lot more like a completely separate story than a different perspective, I actually really enjoyed it. It did not suffer from a lot of the issue I had with Ellie’s part. You pretty much always had a companion with you talking and progressing the plot, and this part of the game is a lot more linear, which is something I prefer, especially in plot heavy games such as this. Additionally, while the character in this part does a lot of bad things and is far from what I would call a good person, the story is about them trying to be better and break from their pattern, rather than letting rage consume them. I found them to be an interesting character that I enjoyed playing as. The game definitely wants you to see parallels between the two protagonists, but at times it was way too on the nose, to the point of it being super weird. For example, both characters are involved in an awkward love triangle involving a man and a pregnant woman.

The third part of the game is really hard to talk about without spoiling anything. It’s much shorter than the other two taking up the remaining of my 28.6 hours of playtime. It starts a little slow, but it is linear and plot heavy like the second part, and while it definitely had some characters acting in ways I did not like it was absolutely riveting, especially towards the end.

Outside of story, the game has a few improvements. Something that really stood out to me was how sometimes when enemies get killed, a different enemy will shout out a name, as if their friend just died. I’m pretty sure they were just reusing the same 5 or so names over and over again, but it really added a lot, even though it’s such a small thing. Another nice addition is crawling. I didn’t find I used it much outside of story and exploration, but it was neat, and did have a really neat combat implication. Sometimes when you get shot, you get knocked onto your back, but can still shoot enemies with your gun. This feels so great when it happens and shoot all the enemies before getting back up.

Overall, The Last of Us Part II is fantastic. It may not hit as hard as the first game, and the writing, characters, and pacing aren’t at the same level of the first, but this is absolutely still a top tier gaming experience that I would highly recommend.

Many of my favourite games are CRPGs. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of reading and this genre seems to be dominated by games lacking full voice acting, so I’ve skipped over many of the most popular ones. This is one such game that lacks full voice acting, but due to it’s low $4 price tag during the sale, I decided to give it a chance, and I am immensely glad that I did. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition is phenomenal. It’s so good that I honestly didn’t miss the lack of voice acting. I’m not going to pretend it’s as good as my favourites in the genre, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium, but it’s a lot closer than I was expecting, and I think might actually be on the same level in some ways.

The game feels incredibly deep with a large amount of build and dialog choice. At times it can be a little overwhelming just how much choice is thrown in your face. There is an option to automatically build characters as they level up, but I always prefer to build them how I want, and I play these sorts of games on easier difficulties, so its usually much harder to make a nonviable build. Speaking of that, I did notice that some of the build options just seemed to be blatantly worse than others. For example on one of my level ups I picked a skill that gave me +2 to one of my skills, but I later realized that there was also a skill, hidden in a drop down, that gave me +4 to the same stat. They seem to stack and I ended up picking both so I do not think it’s a problem to have both, but it would have been nice if the game did something to make it harder to make this mistake. Maybe show a list of similar skills or warn the user if a blatantly better skill exists so that they can pick that first, since I would imagine these decisions matter a lot more on harder difficulties. Honestly, that is the biggest issue this game has: it could have used another pass or two too polish it and fill it with additional QOL features.

Going back to the dialog, I thought it was quite well written. I never once got bored, even though I was reading it myself, rather than listening to the characters speak, as I prefer to do. The story is fantastic and even though it has a lot going on, it’s told in a very simple way that is both engaging and easy to follow. It’s filled with interesting twists and reveals. The dozen or so companions I encountered on my journey all felt unique, interesting, and seemed to have a wide variety of beliefs, although some of them did feel like they could have been developed more throughout the story. I actually ended up killing a few of them off due to conflicts that arose within my party. This is something I don’t think I’ve ever done before, and it was really neat to see. The ones in your party will occasionally chime in during conversations and even banter with each other, which I always really like. I would have liked to see even more of this, but I can’t complain about the amount already in the game. If I had to guess, I would say that only maybe 5% of the dialog is voiced. This seems to mainly be around the introduction of major characters and major story moments. The voice acting is generally quite good and I wish there was more of it, but I really did not mind the reading nearly as much as I thought I would.

The combat is something I did not engage with a lot. This is not because it is bad, I just played on an easier difficulty, where combat mattered less. The game has a number of difficulty presets as well as a dozen or so options you can tweak. I started by selecting one of the easier difficulties, and then tweaked the options a bit, such as re enabling manual level ups. This meant that most of the time, my party just ran in and destroyed everything with basic attacks in a few seconds time. I had fun playing this way, but it’s probably not the way most people are looking to play. For what it’s worth, there did seem to be a large variety of spells, but finding better gear is not super common. On that note, the game doesn’t do a great job of making it obvious how certain things are calculated. All the information is there, just sometimes its buried in submenus inside menus. For example, I spent most of my play through wondering why my archer with lower dexterity always did more damage with their bow than my other archer using the same bow. When I hovered over the damage calculation I did not see anything that explained this. Eventually, I realized that if I opened my inventory, clicked the bow, opened it’s submenu, and I think opened another submenu inside that, I got an explanation telling me that the bows I was using had a modifier that made them add the users strength modifier to their damage.

Something else the game excels at is its sense of scale. Even though the game is divided up into dozens of smaller areas, it manages to feel absolutely massive. It provides a sense of adventure that I have not seen in many other games. This sense of scale is also helped by the fact that the game sort of has 2 modes. In one, you are your party going around doing quests exploring. In the other, you command an army and make military and make diplomatic decisions, and build up fortresses; sort of like a watered down strategy game. I quite enjoyed the balance of having both parts, even if my army strategy consisted of increasing size until I could just auto-win battles.

As a final minor complaint, this game is quite stingy with it’s achievements. Outside of the DLC, It’s not uncommon to sit down with the game, play for a half dozen hours or so and not get a single achievement.

Overall, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition is a game I really cannot recommend highly enough, as long as you are fine with a lot of reading, some somewhat unintuitive menus, and cutscenes that feel quite low budget and could use some polish. The $4 I spent to buy the base game is probably the best $4 I’ve ever spent (Terraria was only $3). I liked it so much I ended up purchasing both seasons passes part way through my game, so my 124 hours of playtime includes the 3 DLCs that were integrated into the main story, but not the 3 standalone DLCs. I honestly believe that If this studio was given more time and a bigger budget, they could make something to Rival or possibly even surpass Baldur’s Gate 3. I will have to check out their other games and I am excited to see what they put out next.

The Elder Scrolls is a franchise that I view as one of my favourites, even though I’ve really only played Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls Online. I own and have played the original Oblivion, but I never beat it or got that far into it. With the release The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, I decided it was finally time for that to change. While I am having a lot of fun with this game and would really like to recommend it, I unfortunately cannot recommend it in good faith.

At this moment, I am just over 30 hours into the game. I have just completed the part where you visit Kvatch, my character is level 23, with multiple level 100 skills, and I have done a total of 2 guild quests (not complete quest lines, just quests). I have also become the champion of the arena, but I have spent most of my time getting distracted on my way to quests, as I like to do in Bethesda games.

This game should not have released in it’s current state. It crashes all the time. You could honestly go pick a few dozen or so random Skyrim mods and install them without reading the descriptions or checking for compatibility, and you would probably have a much more stable experience than this. Even worse, when I crash, I often find that attempting to load the 3 or so most recent saves will instantly crash the game, as if something is corrupted. I’m someone who saves quite often and this game does auto save often so I’ve never lost that much progress, but I cannot remember having a game corrupt my save file since Doom 2016 corrupted my save when I was right near the end back in 2016. Interestingly, both games are published by Bethesda, which may speak to a significant lack of QA from them. At least Doom only corrupted my save file once. In this game I’ve had it happen over a dozen times already.

As for performance, this is unfortunately an Unreal Engine 5 game. It thankfully does precompile its shaders, but it still manages to regularly stutter. Indoor areas and towns seem to mostly be fine, but stutters can be quite bad when exploring the open world. Ignoring the stutters, the game performs acceptably. It’s not great, but it does run about on par with other recent AAA games I have played and does look quite good. I play on max settings, although I do use DLSS. It’s really nice that this game allows you to turn on hardware accelerated ray tracing instead of forcing you to use Unreal’s worse software version. Weirdly though, reflections are still using screen space reflections and the SSR artifacts feel significantly more noticeable than other games, especially when the game starts you near a lot of water. Additionally, the switch to Unreal seems to mean no official modding support, which is a major disappointment.

I know Oblivion has a reputation for having bad level scaling and this game was supposed to fix that. It may be better, but it’s still not great. The level scaling feels super weird and way too fast. At the beginning, everything felt fine. Then somewhere around 10 hours in I started feeling really weak. My attacks were barely damaging enemies, but the game wasn’t hard, I just had to spend a lot of time ruining in circles waiting for my magicka to regenerate so I could cast another spell to tickle the enemy. Then somewhere around 25 hours in, I realized I was already level 20, had multiple skills maxed out at 100 and was easily killing enemies in 2-3 hits again, but as soon as the game made me fight more than 2 or 3 enemies at once, I was back to running in circles waiting for my magicka to regenerate. I have to imagine eventually I’ll unlock the ability to enchant gear to increase my max magicka, but it still feels like a balance issue. I never once tried to level up skills faster and I really haven’t explored that much. I’ve only been to 3 towns including the imperial city, and a dozen or so locations that I passed on may way. Despite this, I’ve been having a ton of fun wandering around, getting distracted by random places and exploring them. The locations in this game are a lot more maze like than Skyrim, with branching paths and that makes it much easier to get lost, which is quite fun.

I do also need to touch on the UI. Bethesda’s RPGs always seem to have bad UIs and this is possibly the worst one I’ve seen, but I’ve never played Skyrim without SkyUI. The font is massive with no way I can see to shrink it. Additionally, things have so much padding. This means barely any items fit on your screen at a time and text often has to be scrolled even though it could easily all fit at once if they just used a more normal font size and less padding. Of course for accessibility reasons it would be best if they just made it adjustable. Unfortunately, that is not all. There are so many menus that feel intuitive and poorly designed. Your inventory has no search. You can only favourite 9 items. There are barely any sort types. Switching to a local map is so unintuitive. Putting items in a chest is impossible without googling a guide (You need to click search, which does not let you search at all, instead it lets you store items). I’m honestly baffled at how Bethesda keeps having horrendous UI. They have over a decade of good UI mods to take inspiration from and they just don’t.

I want to be clear. I’m not hating on this game. I actually really enjoyed the time I have spent with it and will continue to play it; I just cannot recommend a game with this many major issues. That’s not even mentioning the smaller issues, such as the physics engine or something constantly bugging out and emptying the contents of shelves and bookcases onto the floor of every house and shop. If you read this review and don’t think the issues I have mentioned will bother you, go ahead and buy it. It’s a lot of fun, just do so at your own risk. This does not feel like a fully released product, and even the version number, 0.411.something reflects the fact that this is not a 1.0 release. If only they had put that on the store page.

I got Super Bit Blaster XL for free by owning the original, but both games are more than worth their asking price. This is not the most complicated game, but it is a fun little score chaser, and I think the price is quite fair for what the game is. I've played more than 5 hours and I'm pretty sure it regularly goes on sale for under a dollar.

Little Kitty, Big City is a great, little, charming game. It reminds me a lot of Untitled Goose Game. It feels a bit higher budget with it’s 3d graphics, larger world, and more content, but it also feels a bit less polished and less charming. The AI isn’t nearly as fun to mess with, but this game has more of a story and it has characters with dialog. The dialog is quite light hearted, but it still feels well written.

The game is not super long, taking me only 4.6 hours to get most of the achievements and complete what seems like most in game activities, but that is still longer than Untitled Goose Game, which took me only 3.5 hours to do everything other than the speed running achievements. On my Steam Deck the game ran quite well, getting a mostly stable 60FPS on the high preset. When I didn’t lock the game to 60, I could get the full 90 in some areas, but it wasn’t super stable, so I decided to lock it to 60 for a more consistent experience.

I would also like to shout out this game taking full advantage of Steam Cloud. While most games on Steam support Steam Cloud, most only sync progress when the game is closed. On desktop this may seem completely normal, but for Steam Deck owners, this can get a bit annoying since the system has sleep functionality. Games like this and Dave the Diver also sync progress any time you put your Steam Deck to sleep, allowing you to continue where you left off on another device even if you did not completely close the game last time you played. I did not take advantage of this feature in this game, but it’s still really nice to see.

Overall, Little Kitty, Big City is a short, charming, relaxing game that I would recommend to anyone who likes thees types of games.

I don’t say this lightly, but This DLC is really bad. Pretty much as soon as I finished the prologue, before I really learnt how to actually play the game, I accidentally started this DLC and now I seem to be locked in. I want to finish it so that I can try the actual game, but it’s just so extremely boring and has a frustrating checkpoint system that it has made me drop the game not once, but twice. I dropped the game because of this DLC months ago, but with all the praise the sequel is getting I decided to give the game another chance and I just can’t. Without knowing that I like the base game I don’t think I can justify wasting any more time on this boring quest. Maybe if this DLC started later, when I was more familiar with the mechanics and characters I would enjoy it more, but I’m just not sure how you make 3+ hours of doing chores and sneaking around with a horrible checkpoint system fun.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a game that seemed really neat. Unfortunately, its extremely boring. Granted, that may be because all I’ve done so far is the tutorial and part of a DLC I accidentally started, but I’m also almost 9 hours in and not having fun yet, so I’m dropping this game. So far, the writing isn’t interesting, the checkpoint/save system is horrendous, and I just am not having fun.

Firewatch is absolutely fantastic, but it’s also not a game I can say too much about, since this is one of those games that is carried by it’s story and world. You play as Henry and are tasked with patrolling a forested area for fires. You’re basically entirely alone other than a woman, Delilah, who you talk with via radio. The dialog is fantastic and both characters are well written. The world has some stunning scenery and thanks to the cartoony look, it should age very well. The game also has some fantastic music. Without spoiling much there is a somewhat mysterious plot that takes place over the course of the game, so the game is more than just wandering around a forest. While it’s not a very long game, taking me just over 5 hours to 100%, and it does have more bugs than I would expect from such a short and fairly simple game, and it does suffer from traversal stutters; it was an absolutely fantastic experience that I paid 2 or 3 dollars for. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys slower paced story rich games and can enjoy a game that his little to no gameplay.

Outer Wilds is one of those games that I’ve heard almost nothing about, other than that it is a time loop game that everyone seems to agree it’s fantastic and that googling anything will ruin the once in a lifetime experience, so I decided to pick it up without doing any research on it. I even picked up the DLC to have the complete experience. I’m not sure what I am missing, but Outer Wilds just isn’t fun. It doesn’t have much ion the way of gameplay and there is no interesting story or other draw to make up for that.

I will fully give it credit for its uniqueness. This is one of the most unique games I’ve played and the way they handle seamless space flight is really cool. They also done a pretty good job of making it not feel super tedious to travel between planets, although it is still a minor annoyance every time the game loops. The game also has a great soundtrack and the atmosphere it can helps set is fantastic.

Unfortunately, The game just doesn’t have anything that makes me want to continue playing. Every single time the game loops I just want to quit and play something else. I get that 4.4 hours may not be enough time to see the game get good, but without something to make me want to keep playing it’s really hard to justify spending more time on this game. The story is super minimal and it feels like it has gone absolutely no where so far. I haven’t really learnt anything interesting about the lore, world, or characters yet. The world is pretty neat, but the exploration is mostly just lifeless empty worlds with ruined buildings and uninteresting text. The controls are quite awkward which further makes exploring frustrating. I get that a space game will inherently have more complex controls than a normal game, but I just always feel like I am fighting with the controls. I’ve played other space games, like Space Engineers, and I feel it handled this challenge way better. Due to this, I often find myself stuck in places I did not mean to go, and since I cannot find a way to end a loop early other than dying or quitting to title and losing all progress from the current loop, this means I just have to sit there and wait until either the loop ends, or my oxygen runs out.

Maybe at some point I’ll give this game another chance since everyone else seems to thing its a masterpiece, but, at least for now, I I’ve spent enough time on this boring game.

My first Larian game was Divinity Original Sin 2. I thought it was absolutely fantastic and so I bought Baldurs Gate 3 the day it left early access. It went on to become one of my favourite games of all time and I needed more. Rather than wait for Larian to put out a new game, I decided to give their back catalogue a chance. Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition may be older and lacking in production values, but it was still a fantastic experience that really felt like a Larian game. Like all of the Larian CRPGs I have played, not only is it fully voice acted, but the voice acting is fantastic.

The game has you create 2 characters and then throughout the first act allows you to recruit 2 additional companions. You play as source hunters, essential the magic police, who are sent to investigate a magical murder. This is done both by talking to people and fighting enemies in a turn based combat system. Like all Larian games, the combat is really great and it was neat to see a persuasion system that doesn’t just rely on a simple skill check, although this does mean you can quick save and reload to guarantee a win if you so choose. Overall I don’t think my dialog choices mattered all that much, which was a bit disappointing, but I enjoyed the game more than enough to make that a non issue for me.

Of course the game is missing some QOL features of newer Larian games, but it is much less than I was expecting. The biggest annoyance I have is how slow healing is. I have a healer in my party and I understand why they cannot spam their healing spell during battles, but making me wait 30 seconds between healing each character after every battle does get a bit annoying, especially when I cannot control any of my characters or view their inventories for the first 5 or so seconds after casting the spell. Additionally, I thought that several of the puzzles was not well designed. There were a handful of times that I had to give up and google the solution, only to find something I’m not sure how anyone would have solved without spending literal hours trying hundreds of completely random things.

There was also some wired bugs, like teleportation spells not working in most areas, or attacking an enemy resulting in my charterer walking towards the enemy instead of attacking them like the UI indicated would happen. There was also a small handful of random dialog that had no voice acting, even though the sentence before and after had voice acting. Nothing that I would consider super major, but thees issues were a bit annoying to deal with.

Overall Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition is a fantastic experience. While it may be shorter, taking me only 65 hours to beat, I actually think I may have enjoyed it more than Divinity: Original Sin 2. However, that very likely is recency bias since it has been a number of years since I played the sequel, and I will fully admit my memory of it is quite foggy. This game definitely is not be as good as Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s also about a decade older and still holds up very well. You can totally see how this turned into Baldur’s Gate 3 and for anyone who played that and wants more or is interested but cannot afford it, I would highly, highly recommend this game.