Recent reviews by Shepuz

If you are on a vive or index, you know exactly how "not great" the SteamVR overlay is when it comes to interacting with desktop. After using XSOverlay for some time now I'm very pleased with it. There seems to be minimal performance impact and has a lot of customization options. If you like to fiddle with desktop stuff a lot when in VR, for example playing music, checking your OBS settings, or reading stream chat, I'd highly recommend you get this one.

After spending up to 5000ish hours in this social platform.. you could say it's large part of my life.
I've met tons of people, and I've lost tons of people. I've laughed, I've cried, I've lived a little life inside this, and I wouldn't give away even a moment... but.

I cannot recommend this to anyone in its current state though. The devs are planning to implement EAC, which will make modding and using mods, impossible. Impossible to regular chums like me, and impossible to people who actually need the mods to make this platform playable for them, such as disabled people and people with special needs.. mods made the VRC more enjoyable, more safer, and just simply much better, the modders did what the devs either couldn't, or didn't bother to, and now they are implementing something to make these mods unusable.

If the EAC gets implemented to the stable client version, I'll be taking my leave to find a better alternative, a place where they actually listen to their community and encourage creativity. I encourage you to do as well if this ends up happening.

Cheers

One of the best, if not the best open world 3rd person tactical espionage buggery game I have ever had the privilige to play. Shame about KONAMI being *sshats and ruining the experience a bit. The game is great, but it hurts me so bad when I think how much bigger, better, stronger, faster and sexier the game COULD have been. Don't get me wrong, it's still worth buying and playing for.. when the game is on sale (because f*ck KONAMI, don't give them any more money than it is necessary).

5/5 tastes salami

War Thunder is a "free to play" game where you can either take it to the skies in a variety of different airplanes from different nations (USA, UK, GER, USSR and JAPAN), or you can jump in a rather well modeled and simulated tanks from light tanks to anti-air (USA, UK, GER, USSR).

I have quite a lot of hours in to the game and there is a reason for that. I have enjoyed this "free to play" game in the past, and I would love to keep playing it but it seems that one of the patches that came out in the last few months, or something else has changed the restock and repair fee amounts in the game.
Back when I still played actively you were able to outfit your plane/tank and play the game without worrying whether you had enough credits to pay for the restocking of ammo and repairing it after the match, regardless of the outcome of the match itself.
Today I noticed while playing with my Rank III german armor, that even if I managed to kill 1 or 2 enemy tanks in arcade game AND if our team won the match, I lost credits when I came back to my hangar.
I had 96k silver lions (credits used to pay for stuff ingame), I lost 3 tanks and managed to destroy 2 and our team won the match. In the after report I saw that I got slightly over 10K silver lion credits from the match but when I returned to the hangar, it showed I had 94.5k left, which means that unless you are super awesome at this game and manage to take all the points and destroy half of the enemy team without dying yourself even once, you won't be getting much anything out of the arcade matches in terms of credits to buy new tanks.
This is essentially the same method World of Tanks makes you buy premium and use real money at the end-tier tanks. Without one, you won't be able to afford the repair costs after the match etc. etc. etc.

This pretty much saddens me, especially when we aren't even talking about end-tier tanks here in War Thunder, we're talking about Rank III tanks.
Because I have no intention of spending any more real money on this game I suppose I will just have to drop it and stop playing. It's already almost impossible to get to IS-2, Tiger 2 and beyond without using real money, and the grind fest from Tiger H1 to Tiger 2 will literally take you months without premium unless you are willing to spend every waking hour playing the tank portion of the game.

It was fun War Thunder, maybe I'll come back when you cut the repair/rearm costs between matches and actually give players a change to get to the higher rank tanks without pulling out the old credit card.

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online, despite its horrendously long name that doesn't exactly roll off your tongue, is not a bad free2play game.

When we think about F2P FPS games we have, we usually remember the horrendous way how you unlock and buy weapons ingame using the ingame currency you receive by playing. You are usually able to unlock/purchase a weapon for yourself permanently with the earned currency but usually the prices are so high that it will take you months to grind enough to buy even 1 gun, and people usually end up just "renting" it for a week or so.

If the devs of this game hold their promise, none of that bullsh*ttery will be seen in First Assault Online. Devs have stated that they will not offer any "buy it for 1 week" deals, but instead offer all the weapons on the market/store to be permanently purchased with the earned ingame currency (GP), and as it is now you are not able to purchase anything but few character skins, weapon skins and special items using the second, buyable currency (NX).

Weapons are rather expensive, ranging from 40K to 260K GP but you receive 50K GP when you gain a level, thus bringing the overall amount of grinding down. You also receive a daily bonus when you login to the game everyday, and the more concecutive days you login, the better login awards (I received a 400% (500?) XP booster on my Day 5 login award).

All original Section 9 characters are featured in the game and unlockable, you receive 3 free operative licenses which are used to unlock a character to be used (1 when you login in the first time, one when you reach level 3 and one when you reach level 5)

Game itself is a fast paced "tactical" squad FPS that more or less requires cooperation between teammates in order to bring victory to your team, especially in the Demolition and Terminal capture gamemodes. TDM is like any other FPS with TDM in it. 2 teams battle against each other until one side gets to 10000 (or was it 1000?) points. Simple.

The matchmaker in this game seems to work surprisingly well. Most games with a matchmaker are horrible to work with.
The playerbase also seems to be rather large because almost every match I've played this far has had full team on both sides. Matchmaker also seems to take personal match specific stats in to account and balances/shuffles teams between matches to make sure they are as balanced as they can be, and this usually works very well. Most times when I've been on the losing side of a match, we've only lost by few hundred points (which is somewhere around 2-4 kills or so). Thus the matchmakers seems to be capable of keeping the teams balanced in a way that either side may win the match, based on both luck, and how well they cooperate (COOPERATION IS THE KEY PEOPLE).

The devs have managed to get the original english voice actors from GItS SAC on board, and in general the audio side of the game is solid. Characters sound like they should and weapons sound like they pack a punch, unlike the pew pew sounds from games such as CoD. The game is also rather beautiful to look at. Not Crysis beautiful, but beautiful none the less. Characters are easily recognizable and look the part. Guns are also modeled rather nicely and the devs were kind enough to add the Seburo M5 which is the standard issue sidearm for the Public Safety Section 9 from Ghost In The Shell (I have some issues with this weapon but more of that later).


There are few nitpicking though coming from a viewpoint of someone who has watched the original movie, and Stand Alone Complex 1st and 2nd GIGs several times, and the problems I'm having are as follows:

- Seburo M5 is stated to be 9mm ingame although in anime, 2nd GIG, Episode 10, Togusa is seen to agree to prosecutors claim that the M5 is actually 5.7mm. Wikipedia and GItS Wikia both claim it to be 5.45x18mm. I hope devs change the description for the M5 in the future from 9mm to 5.7mm.

- Togusa does not have his personal sidearm, the Mateba autorevolver, and this weapon is not found in the market/store either. The sole reason I unlocked Togusa as my first operative was to get my hands on the Mateba, which he ended up not having.

- All the other Seburo weapons such as C-25, C-26A and C-30 are nowhere to be found in the game, instead you are offered weapons such as M4A1, MP5 variants and other "real world weapon clones". Not having the C-26A which
is the standard issue bullpup PDW/AR hybrid the Section 9 uses is inexcusable and I hope they add at least one of them in the game in the future.

- The mouse in this game is extremely weird. Even with VSYNC and Mouse Acceleration/Smoothing (don't remember which it was) is turned off, you can't truly trust your mouse. In my case, my mouse sometimes when looking around feels like it freezes in place for a fraction of a second, other times, especially when firing full auto, it feels extremely unresponsive and sluggish. Because of this I've seen a lot of players, when running in to a 1vs1 situation, begin to strafe left and right instead of aiming with their mouse, and trying to strafe in a way that the enemy happens to end up inside their crosshair. This is not uncommon, I see this happen in almost every match I play at least once.

Overall, for a F2P FPS, Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online feels like a solid, yet still slightly unfinished game that smells fresh, feels both new and familiar at the same time and seems to have a bright future ahead of it.. as long as the devs don't turn their coats and go with the same solutions other F2P FPS games have used. Game needs more maps, more weapons, and generally "more stuff" such as maybe PVE missions/campaigns alongside with the PVP portion of the game, but for the time being, what they have offered to us is nothing to sneeze at. The game feels solid even with occasional CTD's and small bugs related to the parkour part of the game.

Pros
- Cheap early access and free to play in the future
- Solid gameplay with good graphics and good audio design (ORIGINAL VOICE ACTORS WOOO)
- Easy to get in to, learning to use individual characters different skills isn't hard, runs like your regular FPS game.
- Does justice to the Ghost In The Shell -universe and Section 9
- Has a good working matchmaking system and large playerbase (almost always full teams on both sides)
- Feels like Ghost In The Shell

Cons
- Very little options when trying to change graphic settings
- Mouse feels EXTREMELY weird and awkward
- Rather small variation of different weapons for their classes and except for the Seburo M5, all the other GItS weapons are nowhere to be seen
- Sniperrifle is the most overpowered thing along with shotgun in this game.. for a player who has managed to get over the horrible mouse.
- Not that many maps at the moment to play on (especially TDM), hopefully more will follow with future updates/patches.

Overall, 7½/10 - It's a good solid FPS game with a Ghost In The Shell twist. Will watch development with excitement.

1 Match gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_vDdvl1lO4

don't let the playtime on steam fool ya, I played this "in beta-stage since 3 years ago" game before it came to steam so I've seen what it used to be and what it has become.
First of all it's good to see that they are adding new stuff to the game, even if they are unbalanced as f*ck sometimes, but it's still nice. Although it would be better if the game hadn't been open beta for the last.. what? 5 years? The main problem with the game that I have is that I had spent actual money in the past to train my soldiers and get assault teams so I could have some sort of say in how the war is going. After the awesome update that introduced the completely unnecessary Officer/General heroes, I'm no longer able to deploy my assault teams, I don't even know whether I have any left, and I don't have a soldier/hero to get assault teams and deploy them.. unless I pay for it. The other way is to of course level up your guys but this is something that will most likely take months if not years.
Everything in this game is extremely hard to unlock and grind to, the lower level you are the less credits you get from a battle, even if you manage to do really well during the battle such as kill tons of enemies and armor and cap every single cap on the map, you probably won't make that much credits. If you are like me who mostly does 1 kill per 1 death sort of stats and aren't that great at anything, most of the credits you make out of battle will go to pay for the mods you've put on your gun, and you are going to have to mod your guns, especially bolt-action rifles. to buy a bolt-action rifle and fully mod it to kill with 1 shot (something everybody else, expecially the soviets all seem to have nowadays, 1-hit kill rifles), you are probably going to need somewhere around.. 300 to 400k credits all together, you'll get roughly around 4000 to 6000 per battle. And if you have the earlier mods installed, and use grenades during the battle, about 30 to 75% of that 4 to 6k will go to replenishing/fixing those. So you won't be getting very far very soon without grabbing your wallet and unlocking everything with real money.
There are going to people who will say that I'm biased and that this review is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but they are either old buggers who have played this since the early dawn of mankind and have basically unlocked everything there is to unlock couple of years ago and don't have to do any horrible grinding, or they are really good players who get tons of credits per every game with 100/0 stats.. OR.. they have sunk tons and tons of real money in the game but won't admit it, or claim that "it's not that expensive, it's just few tens/hundreds/thousands of dollars".
It is a free2play game, it can be enjoyable even if you don't sink any real money in it, but you wont get very far or wont be unlocking any of the important stuff without paying from your ass at some point, and everything IS expensive. If you thought War Thunder and it's golden eagles were expensive, think again, the prices in this game are about double to that and everything costs at least a couple of hundred gold (the ingame currency you can buy with real money).

Subnautica, in it's current "slowly getting there" state is.. beautiful, functional, and for a while, quite fun. Of course an early access game can't have THAT much content to it so it will quickly turn boring after you have built the larger submarine and your brand spanking new underwater supervillain base, but the good thing about an early access title such as Subnautica is that the developers are actually.. developing it. Very actively as well. I was actually quite shocked at how frequently they releasethe stable patches to the game, adding more stuff and features and keep making the game more interesting, and if you like weird bugs, dying from radiation across the map from the crashed spaceship or have your inventory completely bugged out and unusable, you can opt in to experimental build which gets updated pretty much daily with stuff that is still being developed and not released as a stable public release. Sort of a sneak peek at what's coming. The gameworld itself is beautiful and colourful. It feels like an ocean of an alien planet with its weird fish and other creatures. One of the few downsides, which can of course be a good thing depending on how you look at it, is that the world is not generated from nothing like in most survival/crafting/derping games such as minecraft, it's hand sculpted so the world will be exactly the same every time you start a new game. This however makes it possible to make the world look extremely beautiful, rich and make derpy things less likely to happen (for example generating several things inside each other and other graphical glitches). There isn't very much to do in the game at its current state however. You get a fairly good crafting thing going on, you can make 2 submarines (smaller exploring vessel and larger submarine that you can build things inside), and build a very simplified and plain base. There are no aesthetic and/or immersion adding things to make such as tables, chairs, vending machines for bases etc. etc. just the most simple things such as corridors, L, T and X shaped passways, few windows and structural supports. I am sure, however, that given time and dedication from both developers and the players this game will reach its full potential, expecially once the modders are given the right tools.

TL:DR
Game is beautiful, the world is quite immersive and feels alive, good crafting system, hand sculpted world, tons of potential, man the battle stations and start welding those bulkheads before the damn sub sinks in to the deep.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is one of those games you'd expect to only cater towards hardcore trucking fans and alike, and that it would be a rather boring experience to everybody else. Somehow the SCS Software managed to make a trucking game that doesn't feel that boring (unless you play 8+ hours a day every single day, then it might start to feel slightly boring) and is actually quite relaxing and enjoyable. The game is solid with little to no bugs in the core game and there are tons of mods available for it if you know where to look. I'd love to see this game have its own Steam Workshop for easy mod installation and to ensure that mods are up to date and compatible with the latest version of the game at all times, but sadly this isn't the case just yet. The game looks beautiful on high settings and features the possibility of using Oculus rift or TrackIR to make the immersion even higher. The only real complaints that a full blown assburger such as myself can muster up is that the immersion hasn't been taken far enough. I'd like to be able to get out of my truck and walk around it, inspecting it, or to pull up to a gas station and walk in and order a coffee and a donut, or buy a can of energy drink to give me a 30 to 60 minute boost so I can drive that last stretch and deliver my stuff. An animation of the driver getting out of his drivers seat and crawling behind for a few hours of sleep would also be nice, but sadly none of these things are in the game.. yet.

To put it short, anyone can enjoy this game, not just hardcore truck enthusiasts, and it's actually quite relaxing to just drive around and deliver stuff from A to B. Gameplay is solid and there aren't any bugs that I have encountered (unmodded that is). Stunning visuals and quite immersive especially with Oculus Rift or TrackIR.

Despite all the old reviews claiming this is not a Pay2Win game, I have to disagree. It is true that you can use the ingame GP currency to buy and permanently unlock pretty much every single piece of weapon and armor upgrades, but everybody leaves out the fact that an average player with a K/D ratio slightly above 1 (1 kill for 1 death), closing to 2 is going to make around 150 to 200 GP per match.. to unlock even a simple upgrade piece for any of the weapons costs at least 4000 to 6000 GP. You can of course just spend 200-400 GP to unlock a piece for 3 days, but it would make more sense to just permanently unlock it, and if you don't like grinding for a few days just to permanently unlock one AR stock or a magazine upgrade, you are going to have to grab your creditcard and load up on the other ingame currency that can be bought with real money.. the zen. Everything is a lot cheaper in Zen but it's still pretty damn expensive. So Yeah. The gameplay itself is solid, the graphics look from okay to stunningly beautiful at times and the game handles as any other online FPS game out there should. Technically the game is solid and if you are a casual player who just wants to jump in to shoot futuristic looking guys in the face or walk around in a exoskeleton mechasuit thingy from time to time and aren't THAT serious about it, you should try it out. BUT.. it's still Pay2Win, no matter what other people tell you. It's not the worst case of Pay2Win (like Hawken), but it's still Pay2Win.

Dark Souls reminds me of the old NES and SNES games.. mainly because it's way harder than any game in the last.. decade or so. It's not hard because of overpowered enemies or because the base difficulty is ramped.. it's hard because nobody is there to hold your hand and giving you 50 seconds to push a button to immediatelly insta-kill everything in sight. This game requires you to die, learn from it, and adapt.. something most games today lack because lameasses require a giant pulsating neonsign throbbing on their screen telling them to mash A and B together while wiggling their penis at their sister next room in order to survive. If you are going to buy this game however I'd recommend either getting trainer/cheats for it or blocking its internet access because the game is filled with dumbasses who have hacked over 9000 stats because the developer of the port didn't think it was necessary to implement any sort of anticheat or block feature against invasions. So if you enjoy games with oldschool/pre CoD era difficulty that doesn't nurse you through the entire game and don't mind using a pad to play on PC (you can get a mod/fix for keyboard + mouse control but controller is still better), I'd recommend you to buy this game. Just remember to either block it, or get a hack to freeze your HP incase some asshat decides to invade (and there's plenty of those).