Recent reviews by sera_cael

This is a video game.
Quintessentially and quite literally, a video game.
You won't be purchasing any fluff if you buy this.

Should you buy this? If you like video games, Yes. You should.

What you shouldn't buy, are the steam DLC's. Not unless you want to suck the fun out of the game's natural progression system for the sake of giving Capcom a few extra bucks.

This game is a game. Even though it's 2019. Thank you, Capcom.
I love you.

Metro 2033 has some very frustrating internal battles.
It wants to have deep and meaningful choices. Yet it doesn't, and bases the ending choices off of things like, listening to long conversations, playing a guitar, or waiting to knock out guards until they're done talking. This game also aims to boast gameplay systems that make you feel as if you're a "survivor". Yet, it feels rather like just an idea instead of reality.

While 2033 has aspects that definitely do immerse, and make you feel as if you are "surviving", pumping your flashlight, burning cobwebs, low resources on higher difficulties, etc; The linear ended exploration and combat situations really make me, as a player, feel like I am not in control of my own survival, instead what DOES is the luck of exploiting human OR mutant ai whilst in tense combat scenarios.

Not to say everything is bad. This game was revolutionary for its time, offering a unique world with sluggish illusion of choice based gameplay, an immersive setting, interesting factions, emotional soundtrack, and unique enemies.
Metro 2033 is an old game, and they have given it a fresh coat of paint with this Redux, but somehow it feels as if the new assets, revamped gameplay, cutscenes, and improved stealth mechanics don't outweigh the "old game" design flaws that have inevitably been fixed or upgraded with the counterpart to this Redux, Metro Last Light.

Today, this game doesn't hold up, but is a must play in it's own right because it does offer a unique experience, and indeed makes it THAT much more rewarding when you get to its meatier sequel and understand the characters, setting, and political idiosyncrasies in the deep world that Dmitry Glukhovsky and 4A games have crafted.

Metro 2033 is an ambitious attempt to inspect humanity at a microscopic level. A game that wants to explore deep political conflict between factions, and how one man can blur the lines between ideologies for the betterment of a species. While it does fail in many areas, it triumphs in many as well.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is incredible.
It has horrible lip-syncing, graphical issues, animation inconsistencies, dated controls, shoddy optimization, unfair micro-transactions, and inconsistent npc voice acting.
Yet, I will continue to play this game over and over again for the majority of the foreseeable future.

I genuinely appreciate the absolute love and care that went into crafting the world this game takes place in, the incredible sound track, beautiful level design, endless lore through environmental story telling, npcs, pocket secretaries, emails, e-books, the list goes on and on. It's just incredible.

Too many games are trying to be a mile wide and an inch deep, but this game sticks to gaming's roots and delivers one of the most incredible worlds I've ever explored. Absolutely fantastic depth, practically endless. There are so many possibilities within the game world, They allow you to do almost anything you want, and the world even reacts based on what you do and discover.

Not to mention the DLC, more specifically A Criminal Past, which features new assets, characters, and lore; Probably one of the best DLC's I've played for a game to this date. Fantastic writing, superb level design, likable and interesting characters, and just a great unique setting for Deus Ex.

It's amazing to see the heart of the immersive sim as a genre still proudly beating.
Here's to hoping Square Enix can get their s h i t together and fund this fantastic team to make another Deus Ex.

Mankind Divided will be in my heart forever as one of the most engaging and unique gaming experiences I've ever had the pleasure to delve into, And I've still only scratched the surface.

This game was made by 10 people. Those 10 people have acheived more than you will ever achieve in your life time.
Maybe you should buy this game. Play it with a couple friends my boy.

The best story of this generation. Period.
Experience this. The acting, the motion capture, the visuals, the story, it's will encapsulate you.
This is one of the most inspired games I've ever seen.
$30 dollars, 7-9 hours of gameplay, and a story that will leave you emotionally torn.
Play it.

Fallout 4 is the most immersive and realistic next-gen Bethesda experience you can get.

It includes the options to:

- Shoot things in real time.
- Drop to 20 FPS in the vanilla game while sporting a 1080ti.
- Enjoy quests that branch out to 15+ other ones.
- Indulge in a lackluster narrative.
- Enjoy an underrated and atmospheric original soundtrack.
- Immerse yourself in a confused de-saturated crayola themed color palette.
- Over-mod the game to an incoherent mess not dissimilar to Fallout: New Vegas.
- Waste hours of your precious and potential-filled life building pointless settlements for two-dimensional characters that steal the resources you spend hours collecting, wasting even more of your time!

And all for $29.99!

If you have the patience to have the game run like GTA4 on a Windows ME computer, and enjoyed the previous games with little bias and nostalgia, this game is better, and will entice you for many hours of your life and then leave you in the dust thinking, "Why the hell did I waste my life playing this if I can't remember 3/4's of it?".

This is truly, a perfect last-gen experience.

This game is unfinished. You're a ball, you roll around, sometimes you can get electrified or become wood; Get to the end. Winexy is using 50% of UE4's stock material systems and blueprints. This game is also very tedius, and the design is all over the place and very incoherent. The controls are floaty, and the menus are awful.

But you know what, good for you Winexy. This is a complete game. It's broken, and a mess, but it's out on steam and someone shipped it. At least it's not in "Early Access", Props to you for that man. Everyone makes choices in their life, to the one small boi who shipped this game, good on you, everything is life experience. Props for the confidence.

This game is $0.99, buy it, have a laugh with your friend.

Controversially, this has to be one of my favorite GAMES of this generation, if not my absolute favorite. For some reason this game captured me, I didn't have previous Final Fantasy experience besides less than 5 hours in FFVII. But, this game, qwerks and all, intoxicated me with interesting sights, really cool characters, amazing real-time gameplay, and a big world to explore. The story packs so many cliches but it still manages to be unique, at least for my liking.

This game is not perfect, but looking at it as a holistic piece of media, the sum of it's parts make for a very encapsulating experience. Unless you're biased and want to hate this game, in which case, have fun, it's called free will for a reason.

As for the PC port, I have a GTX 1070 and an Intel i7 7700, and it runs above 60fps at all times on Ultra (and after turning a couple things down and manually allocating 8gb of VRAM as compared to 4 in the config files I run around 90-165fps), but from a game that came out at the same time as games like Doom (2016), and being one that is rough around the edges, I would have expected a little more leeway. But, apparently older GPUs can still handle this game at 60fps, which is good, but it doesn't seem like the developers optimized for this game to truley shine on modern rigs, which is a little bit disappointing.

The worst offender in this situation though, seems to be Nvidia; All in-game Nvida settings will drop you at least 20fps, whether you're in 1080p or 800x600, and allow for some annoying stutter, whether you have a 1080TI or Intel HD Graphics. It seems as if Nvida in all cases where they have their own settings they help developers integrate into their games, whether it be Killing Floor 2's Gib system or The Witcher 3's Hairworks, don't want to put much effort into optimization, which is odd, coming from a company that wants you to buy their hardware, yet can't make something that can actually be run on anything other than the latest tech, and barely even then.

The controls feel great and are very fluent, minus the lack of mouse movement in the menus, the notch snapping 1-5 sensitivity slider, and the IJKL movement in the map. The visuals, while rough around the edges are sometimes state of the ART, and have definitely seen an improvement over the PS4 and XBOX One; And there definitely is a bargain here for the full game, all DLC, and exclusive content (no matter how odd it is (why half life???)), for $49.99.

The game as of now has a Alt-Tabbing problem, where when you tab back in, the game is in windowed mode but you can fix that by pressing Alt-Enter, I've also seen a bit of asset flickering while the camera zooms in and out in cutscenes; and oddly enough, it seems the lower the fps you get, the higher your mouse sensitivity will be. Those will probably be fixed in the coming weeks; and thankfully the settings are more gracious than some past Square Enix PC ports.

Overall, this is a good way to play this game, mouse and keyboard just feels right, and the addition of an uncapped frame-rate is definitely welcome.
If you are on the fence about trying this for the first time, You should play it, because the port is more than adequate minus the Nvida settings, and the game is cheesy as HELL but somehow makes your heart feel the feelings.

More than decent story, Good characters, adequate port, odd side missions and weird qwerks, but very friendly and open about itself, if you let yourself get immersed, the game will gladly oblige.

It has d i l d o s.

Actually it doesn't.

It's really fun though. You should get it full price to support the devs who have cried many days and nights about how many weeks, months, and years, they put into development to have a joke game, Goat Simulator, Smash the sales of this game by 300+%. Life sucks, doesn't it.
Hey, at least this game is good.

Yeah uh, you can play this for like 5000 hours if you want, it also has mods.
It's also kinda hasn't aged well, like at all. Bethesda has always been behind in their engines though. Congrats to Obsisian Entertainment for making a full game like this in like a year and half, even though it's incoherent and very sloppy in many areas. But still, If you want to spend the best 10 dollars you can, you should probably get this.