Recent reviews by Squire Zed

Dying Light 2 isn't a terrible game, but it's one that's hard to recommend three years out from release, because a lot of the "day one roughness" never got fixed- or, indeed, feels like it's maybe even gotten worse.
Playing through a quest? Sometimes, NPCs or even doors will say "Please wait." However, as far as I can tell, waiting has never fixed this, at least not in the "stand there and wait for it to resolve" sense. What can fix it is leaving the area and coming back, because it looks like what's happening is the game doesn't load a state properly and instead of ever resolving just gives up.
Physics is fun, and one of the highlights of the game when you drop kick an enemy into a wall. Little less fun when you stagger an enemy *through* a wall, and their loot is lost forever. Fortunately it seems like the game will either retrieve them or force kill them so you don't end up stuck, unlike with quest givers, but there are a number of stuck spots- I've usually been able to get unstuck, but it's really immersion breaking in a parkour focused game to end up stuck between two objects floating two feet off the ground and have to mash keys until some combination of jumping and dodging and clambering works to get free.
Co-op is not the ideal way to experience this game either, unfortunately. Quests seem to break more often, but also a lot of actions pull players to each other, which can be disruptive if you're split off doing a fight and your co-op partner pulls you to a quest. Not the end of the world but it doesn't feel seamless, especially since a lot of things like even minor NPC dialogue pull you to your co-op partner.
Real world clock quests to grind faction reputation is also a thing, which is basically a way of saying "You're going to have to play for several weeks to actually access this content locked behind high ranks." Not sure that's a terrible sin, nothing in the NPC shops are so incredibly special that you would be missing out too much, but it does just feel like a padding technique.
Additionally, I seem to have more performance issues now than I did the first time I played the game, with random stuttering, weird performance, needing to kill and restart desktop window manager to use my taskbar after quitting the game, etc. I'm not sure what the culprit is, could be my system, might be a bit of rose tinted glasses in favor of the performance closer to release.
Story is fine, it's a zombie sandbox story, don't expect too much and you'll be fine. Movement is pretty good, it definitely is a priority, and you can use tools like the glider and grappling hook to cheese annoying bits of some platforming segments so it's neat. But passable combat and a good-enough story don't make up for the fact that the game just feels rough to play mechanically. It feels like most of the updates since launch were simply pushing DLC (and admittedly some free content) but not addressing engine issues or bugs or whatever is causing the issues I'm still having. And it's a shame- there are some moments where the game does feel great, but unfortunately the grinding attrition of bugs and other issues just tallies up throughout until by the end it's more frustrating than not.

A strong, classical CRPG, which while a bit linear compared to many of the genre greats is underpinned by strong combat, solid exploration, and engaging writing. The mechanics are where the game really shines- they're well understood and built and surprisingly transparent for the complexity of the system. While the overarching story might be a little bit generic (a ship in space where things have gone wrong? Never heard that one before) characters are pretty interesting and while the factions can sometimes come off as a pastiche of a concept instead of realistic groups of people the moment to moment interactions, quest design, and characters are done well.

Skill choices and builds are rewarded both in gameplay and narrative, which is refreshing, and while it is a relatively short CRPG it feels like the "right" length and scale for the game. Additionally, post release support with updates to the engine (particularly around graphics) shows some strong devotion to the game and community.

I will admit my playtime is inflated because I left the game running while I was doing some work stuff and eating food, but in probably closer to four hours of playtime I've been having the full nostalgia experience for one of the greatest RPGs ever made. It's clear that love and attention to detail has been exercised in this faithful restoration of a game *as you remember it*, with some of the rough edges sanded down a bit (particularly the not particularly great leveling system of the original game), a fresh coat of paint that is familiar but so dramatically improved that you'll forget that the original doesn't look nearly as good as you remember it looking back in 2006.

There are a few pain points- performance could be a bit better, though it's certainly not terrible either and I am running above the "recommended" settings for my system with relatively few hiccups without frame generation so I think that's reasonable given the strong visual performance- unlike a lot of poorly performing games, the occasional stutter or slowdown feels justified by an astonishingly beautiful re-imagining of Cyrodil. There is a crash that I encountered repeatedly while doing alchemy, but only in one specific context and I haven't been able to reproduce it since then so I am unsure if it's a broad issue and I'm getting lucky or a narrow issue and I was unlucky.

However, there is so much more to praise for what I believe is one of the strongest Bethesda games of all time, and this really does feel like a game that can go toe to toe with recent releases aiming for similar playstyles like Avowed, Atomfall, and even Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and say proudly "Don't forget about your elders." While it may not win in a direct comparison to all those games- there are still obvious remnants of the limitations of 2006 technology- you're certainly bound to enjoy it whether you have nostalgia for the original or never picked up an Elder Scrolls game before.

Mandragora isn't a bad game per se, the combat is engaging, the world building is *mostly* good, but it just struggles to cross the finish line and in competition with other Souls-likes and Metroidvanias it just doesn't quite hit the point of being worth recommending versus its competition, unless you have a particularly large budget or enjoy both genres a lot.

Combat is a little bit too shallow for a Soulslike, with each "class" basically being what you have in your off hand. Once you hit level 25, you can "multiclass" to unlock the other implements (no restrictions) so there isn't a big need for FOMO though some classes do feel better than others. The big limitation is that while you have several skills, you can only set four at a time (two sets of two). This means in combat you basically have four buttons to do damage with, a dodge, a sprint, a jump, and... that's about it. Now, Soulslikes often have a variety of weapons to make up for this, but for the most part weapons feel pretty samey- you might have special effects on certain weapons, but these serve more to reinforce your build decisions than make the weapons feel particularly different.

Being 2D, obviously combat is much more restricted in terms of mobility and that's fine, but it still leads into situations where you're basically mashing buttons to kill enemies, dodging when they attack, rinse, repeat- some of the boss fight patterns are engaging, but they get recycled throughout the game and there are only a handful of fights that feel truly unique (and some of those feel annoying, like the werewolf boss in the ruins who has some very hard to read attacks- not because of the moveset, but because of readability).

Additionally, there are a lot of pallet swap enemies later in the game (admittedly done pretty well, for the most part, to not feel too samey, though there are some cases of just the same enemy again but with scaled stats). This is particularly notable in the miniboss fights, where you'll be fighting giant rats a half dozen times with basically the same moveset. It feels like it's padded out, and there are some disappointments when a bunch of story boss fights turn out to be reskins (the Ferryman is basically a reskin of the graveyard keeper, furnace keeper, dungeon keeper, etc.... and while they have slight alterations they're basically color grading and a gimmick on top of a pretty standard big enemy pattern).

The big problem for both combat and exploration is readability, and to be clear this is not something Mandragora universally struggles with- there are some places where readability is great and everything feels right. But there are plenty of other places where effects might blend with backgrounds, other moves, or just be too subtle or brief in comparison to the movement of an enemy, like heavy armored greatsword enemies who can turn on a dime despite having very slow attacks. While most of these can be learned with memorization, there are others that just require luck- there's no way of knowing that there's a lockpick behind foreground terrain in the citadel.

Exploration is both refreshing and frustrating. The environment design in Mandragora is incredible. While some environments definitely take the spotlight and others feel a bit more generic, there is impressive attention to detail and while some environments do repeat elements they mostly never feel too familiar (exception being the Entropy, which is conceptually cool but unfortunately tends to be just a spot to relegate gimmicks that don't work with the world building in other areas). This is by far one of the prettiest 2D platformers I've played, with some really great art and environmental design.

However, the gameplay of exploring those environments is often relatively lackluster. There's the classic crumbling walls and floors, grappling hook points, areas accessible with mobility features, but for the most part these are built in a somewhat linear way- despite twisting around, there's basically a mandatory path through *most* of the game, and while there are a couple optional areas they are pretty scant on content and serve only to hide a couple achievements and do feel a bit like they're padded for extra content, with less writing and engagement (though strong attention to environmental detail) than the main game content. The game's final act also really lets down the quality and exploration- despite having the most movement tools, it feels pretty straightforward.

The biggest failure of exploration is that mobility features often feel bad and the game is excessively punitive with regards to "undesired" movement. This is not a game for speedrunners. Crossing certain boundaries, even dropping a distance which shouldn't be fatal, often results in instant death, movement can feel fiddly and clunky, with interacting with ladders being a constant pain point when you grab one unexpectedly or, worse, don't and fall to your death. Being a Soulslike-Metroidvania fusion combat is constant, and often leads to frustration- I died more to falling off ledges because of rolling through an enemy and not grabbing the ledge than enemies themselves. Unlike a lot of 2D platformers with combat that involves dodging, there is no ledge magnetism or blocks for running off of ledges, which leads to a lot of moments where you might not spot a ledge and roll to your death, which isn't excessively punitive but does waste a lot of time running back to where you were.

Additionally, the mobility features you do unlock don't encourage exploration- the only things in old areas behind new exploration unlocks are optional boss fights (that usually lack interesting rewards or narratives), blueprints for more inventory clutter, and resources. None of this is particularly engaging- crafting is grindy for relatively limited rewards, since I found myself buying or looting better gear anyway. Just running the main story path will result in a better experience, and while some craftable equipment might make you stronger, missing it will just mean you rubber band at the next shop. Both crafting, and locked chests requiring lockpicks,

The writing just doesn't justify the world. There's a lot of Proper Noun syndrome, characters who are supposed to be cryptic and mysterious but are just the setup to a cliche plot twist without the investment or depth to make it worthwhile, and a very linear story that feels like there are "right answers" to everything despite having multiple options makes it feel like the bare minimum of writing effort was invested to give an illusion of a bigger story that often falls flat in the way that mediocre grimdark writing often does, leaning on tropes and archetypes instead of mystery or immersion.

Finally, there are some real privacy concerns related to the EULA. I'm not particularly privacy conscious, but if I'm playing a singleplayer game locally on my PC, I shouldn't be getting a bunch of information hoovered up into the cloud. Some things like analytic data are fine- I like bugs getting fixed- but the privacy policy for this game is overly permissive and concerning.

At the end of the day, you'll get some pretty scenery and maybe a few interesting fights, but you could give this one a skip and not miss anything too special, which is a shame because there are glimmers of greatness that never get fully fleshed out here. If the publisher was less shady, and there was better writing, and the game's pacing didn't feel unpolished and rough, it could be an easy recommendation, but between painful platforming, repetitive combat, and a disappointing final act, I think for $40 you could pick up some classic Castlevania collections or indie Soulslikes and have a better time. If the fusion appeals to you, just know that the platforming and Metroidvania side of things just isn't quite up to par here.

Civilization VII is an okay game from a better than okay pedigree, and that's why this gets a recommendation to skip from me.

It's not that there can't ever be a good game here. The bones are fundamentally functional. But it's clear that this is not a good game yet. While I don't want to just rant about what's wrong with the game and not offer any praise, it is just not something I can recommend at the current state.

Pros:

First, the good- I actually think the ages idea is good and potentially great. It's a bit janky on implementation, though, with a real emphasis on speeding up the game instead of being actually worth having for its own purposes (see Millenia, a game that does age transitions right even though the game itself is much more "indie" feeling), and that shows in the way that the progression tracks are just ways to speed up the game and move from point A to point B in terms of game design. That can be fixed, though I'm skeptical that it will be, but I'm going to reserve judgement on how that actually feels in practice until I put more time into the game to see how it feels since right now I can just see the shaping elements and not the actual nuance and if it feels disruptive.

Second, combat is better, in theory. It doesn't feel as good as earlier games because it's not tactile, the UI sucks, and a bunch of things are lacking clarity, but those are all perception issues and not mechanical issues, and I do think there's some real opportunities to explore the system in ways that earlier games didn't support. It feels less arbitrary, more consistent, and momentum between forces across multiple turns and unit stacks feels reasonable.

Okay, that's about all the praise. Now into the rough bits.

Cons:

The UI. The UI is terrible. There's a reason a lot of the screenshots and trailers omit the game UI or parts of it, and that is because it is atrociously bad. It alternates between an actually rather good UI style mixed with what I would call "Unity engine default UI". Health bars are just blocks of pixels, there is far too much flat grey and void space. Information that was accessible in tooltips in Civ 6 isn't anymore, so if you build a wonder and forgot the exact effects between the 30 turns its queued and construction finishes, time to stop what you're doing and pop into arcane menus or the Civilopedia to find the answer. Some of the elements look fine or even good, but others look terrible and lazy, and I've noticed several times when radials that should fill up (like science and culture progress bars) seem to either not fill or are arbitrarily full. The tooltips that do exist often just restate onscreen text.

Figuring out what's going on in a menu, why you can or can't build a structure, and navigating the interface is somehow harder despite there being less micromanagement. The dioramas that pop up for things are neat, but they don't carry the either too busy or suspiciously empty menus. There's a whole lot of moments of "this needs to look good" at the expense of feeling good, or just neglected bits that apparently no one cared about doing either.

The mechanics. In theory, Civ 7 has decent mechanics compared to other "day one" Civ games. But the problem is that a lot of these systems are poorly explained, extremely "funnel" like, just dumbed down from Civ 6, or bound behind insufficient or clunky UI. Want to send a merchant to trade with a neighbor? The places you think you would click to make that happen do nothing, but the method is pretty simple (sending the merchant there). However, that is unnecessarily separated from the UI which contains the trade route information. Stacking units into an army? Neat mechanic, but what that does is poorly explained by a slapdash tutorial and the actual micromanagement of it feels rough and unintuitive. None of these things are so terrible they can't be learned and overcome, but forcing players to look up what a decision would do in the Civilopedia whereas Civ 6 had it in a tooltip is a downgrade. The tutorials are designed for TikTok attention spans, containing too little information to explain mechanics but popping up constantly for even the most basic elements.

Player agency. In theory, Civ 7 should introduce a lot *more* player agency. There's actually some clever design around how settlements work, with the compromises between rural and urban districts (except that rural districts offer so little rewards relative to urban ones in most contexts but we don't need to go there right now), separating leaders from civilizations, etc. that on paper there should be a lot of ways to customize your experience. Except, the actual ability to customize your game experience is extremely limited in comparison. Six difficulty levels (down from eight in Civ 6), the standard game speed toggles, six randomly generated map types (with no descriptions because useful tooltips are banned now apparently), three map sizes (tiny, small, and standard), with additional "advanced" settings for age length (shorter, default, longer), disaster intensity, and a toggle for crises. Additionally, you can set the number of AI.

There's a lot of stuff that's missing or opaque for no reason. No options for independent factions, (city states meet barbarians with all the nonsense that comes with that), no ability to actually craft AI factions like you can with the new Mementos, and most importantly no verbose tooltips about what anything does to actually explain "Okay, this difficulty changes X" or "Age length means that it takes X% more/less progress to advance". It's literally like they designed the game to obfuscate the entire experience, which feels bad if you've been playing Civ 6 with a selection of settings that you've honed over dozens of games and suddenly those options either don't exist or are so dumbed down and unclear that you're guessing in the dark as to what they mean.

Finally, content. This is actually a mixed bag. With a 2k account connected to unlock the arbitrarily restricted Napoleon you have 24 leaders (25 with the Tecumseh "DLC" in the founder/deluxe edition). This actually isn't a terribly small pool of leaders to choose from, more than the number of leaders in Civ 6 at launch, and they're independent of civilization so in theory they give you a lot more permutations to choose from. Additionally, there are now 31 civilizations! Great! While these feel meaningfully distinct and impactful, they're going to be exploited via a pretty predatory monetization scheme of DLCs, and the fact they feel so different and many are tied to terrain or environments actually means that the flexibility to switch between them as you go from age to age (and there's only ten per age with the exception of the Age of Exploration getting eleven at launch) the flexibility doesn't really exist unless you happen to get cursed map generation or pick exclusively terrain independent features since there will be a "right" path for most games.

I don't think Civ 7 is even a bad game. It's solidly "okay" (which is damning in and of itself for a series with this much pedigree). However, it commits the cardinal sin of AAA games- being mediocre but asking for amazing amounts of money to get there. It fails to commit to its interesting changes, but also struggles to bring forward the elements that made Civilization games compelling. There is no reason to splash out $70 and then another $60+ on DLC over the years on a mediocre implementation of a 4x formula when I can snag, say, Millenia (which did the age transitions a lot more elegantly and in actually interesting ways like branching paths and even whimsical scenarios and different game end-states instead of just using it to "fix" bloat) and have another $70 left over. And that's why I can't recommend Civ 7. That may change as I play through some games or if the game gets improved (without robbing players blind along the way) but for now, just stick with Civ 6.

Heroes of Hammerwatch II is a generational leap from Heroes of Hammerwatch, the roguelite action RPG that accompanied the more traditional ARPG format Hammerwatch. Taking the best features of HoH and adding smart improvements makes this an easy recommendation, and while I would easily recommend both games I'll focus on what's new here.

The equipment system offers some flexibility in weaponry and builds, letting you experiment with a selection (though not an incredibly robust one) of different weapon and armor types. Try playing a rogue wearing light armor with a wand, or a wizard with a sword and shield and heavy armor, or a warrior with a bow and medium armor- while it might not be optimal, the flexibility is neat. Weapons and armor can be a good way to build up across multiple runs, giving bonuses to an array of stats and sometimes even special effects that can open up opportunities for a specific playstyle. It's not so overpowering that it feels like you're hitting a win button, but it is significant enough to really feel like progression, while not being so convoluted or deep that it becomes unapproachable without a theorycrafting guide. Later in the game, upgrading item levels and enchanting gear to change effects or increase rarity can be useful as well, though not required to do well.

Redone classes with additional customization offers more complexity to the gameplay loop. HoH had classes that had one attack, three skills, and two passives. HoH2 has similar, with weapons that have either one or two attacks depending on how many hands they occupy (both of which count as weapon skills, benefiting from your weapon power- including some very powerful staff attacks for casters), classes which have two active and two passive skills, and then on top of that a choice from three class specializations (unlocked at level 10) for each class that add two additional skills, one active and one passive that can transform your playstyle signficantly. Additionally, each run gives the chance to unlock temporary but transformative skill upgrades that allow you to leverage a class or specialization's playstyle in a particular way- regain health when using your melee attacks as Warlock to become a powerful caster tank, or become a demolitionist rogue who can drop grenades when you dodge away from enemies. These can even be used to transform a class's playstyle, like turning sorcerer's lightning crowd control shotgun style attack "Discharge" into a more precise ice cone that can easily destroy bosses at the expense of AoE capability.

Trinkets have been reexamined and a lot of them now either scale better into the later game (including the highly repeatable NG+ cycle) or are generally more valuable to begin with. Many of the "filler" trinkets in HoH that became annoying and could ruin runs because of their comparatively low value are gone, while most classics returned. Adjustments made to some trinkets seem to be balanced well in my experience. While I've sometimes been disappointed to get certain trinkets because of what a specific run needed, there aren't many I find myself disliking entirely and I am very strongly opinionated about trinkets.

Additionally, the graphics have been made much more granular, with a smaller pixel size than the original HoH. While there are a few graphical bugs at this time like flickering on specific floor textures or the occasional mistake with an errant tile or detail, there is some beautiful pixel art and the game looks spectacular. Importantly, it's also much more readable and easy to understand in busy situations, which is great when a bunch of particle effects are flying about.

If you enjoyed the original game, I can easily recommend this one. And, if you didn't play the first, I'd recommend this to you too if the combination of top down action RPGs and robust meta progression appeals to you, as I really haven't played anything quite like HoH/HoH2 in the action RPG scene.

I got this game, like, years ago and never played it. Must have been in a bundle, or I grabbed some other game at the same time and it stole my attention, but boy was that wrong.

Heat Signature is Hotline Miami by way of FTL, a roguelite sci-fi John Wick simulator with engaging game play, some really great immersive-sim-lite "it just works" shenanigans and some really clever game design and mechanics. I won't say it's frustration free (having a character mission to assassinate an armored target when you just can't find armor piercing weapons because of RNG is painful) and some enemy types can just come down to "Did you get lucky with your loot drops so far this run?" but it has the punchy satisfying combat that Hotline Miami and its cohort have introduced- high stakes, high reward combat, with both ranged and melee options.

Although it's easy to become the ultimate killing machine by the end of a character's development, there are enough threats and challenges that the combat rarely gets stale. Characters retire after completing personal missions, and starting a new character can put you at the whims of RNG for your first couple missions so sometimes it can feel like you've lost a lot, but taking over the universe requires sacrifice. Persistent unlocks for capturing stations expand your shop inventories so you can pick up the toys you personally find fun to use pretty early into subsequent runs. This keeps you from getting too stuck into a specific loop, and you can always park a mercenary and give someone else a spin if you've found a build you really like (though you will get less liberation progress the more you play the same character).

Ultimately, Heat Signature is a shenanigans filled game that lets you play either John Wick or a slapstick comedy version depending on how things play out, and there are a lot of gadgets and toys in addition to weapons that add strategic and tactical depth to your playthrough. Easily recommended.

A tragically underrated game.

Many people, myself included before I played it, judged Midnight Suns on the weakness of any of its constituent parts. Some people don't like deck builders, some people don't like the Marvel brand of story telling, some people don't care for turn based combat, and so on. However, at the end of the day Midnight Suns manages to truly be something more than the sum of its parts. I won't say the story is perfect (it's not, but it's not terrible either), or that the gameplay never gets repetitive (it definitely can), or that there aren't any other problems you can find with the game. If you want to have a bad time with it, you can.

But if you want to have a good time with the game, it presents a lot of opportunities to enjoy tactical combat, a relatively fresh story that while occasionally bundled with super hero baggage is actually unique enough to not feel like the a Marvel movie plotline bundled into a game. Most of the character designs are very good, both cosmetically (even if they do sometimes look like the Temu version of their superstar actor's likeness) and tactically with a lot of thought being given to synergies and mechanics. There's a surprising amount of depth and control to the game, but it never feels so overwhelming that it's daunting, while never feeling so trivial that the mechanics don't matter. It's truly found a Goldilocks zone that so many games never accomplish.

I don't think there's been a game that I would describe so thoroughly as being underrated. I don't think Midnight Suns is the greatest game ever made, or anything like that, but rather it's a shame that it's not thought of as being transformative for a genre (because it *could* be with some of its very good design decisions) or lauded on its own merits because so many people saw spandex and nope'd out.

STALKER 2 is a flawed, but very enjoyable game. I definitely have noticed some major problems, but I've also had a lot of fun when the game is working as intended, which does happen the majority of the time I've been in game.

To address the elephant in the room, STALKER 2 is not a stable game as of release. It has a lot of hitches (I believe the most prominent of these are actually related to loading areas or assets, possibly bad culling or AI optimization since it happens when entering populated buildings/urban areas, but isn't persistent throughout the game world and is pretty minimal outside of urban areas which tend to be the worst), at least one nasty memory leak that periodically grinds the game to a halt after a couple hours of uptime (which, to be fair, if you play in healthy session lengths you won't notice... but gamers and healthy do not go together), and a few hard locks and crashes that I've encountered. Over the course of ten hours, I've had three crash to desktops, two of which were from a corrupted autosave but fortunately I had a quicksave right before and the game is generous with keeping sufficient saves to prevent getting you locked on a bad file- which is good, too, because it can save right as you're bleeding to death. I also had one total hard lock out of nowhere which required a system restart. Finally, the shader caching takes a long time and seems to need to be run every boot, even if nothing has changed, which is annoying but hopefully an oversight that can be patched shortly.

You're going to hear a lot of people saying the optimization is bad. It isn't, per se, and the game is gorgeous and runs remarkably well for my specs, performing far superior to what I would expect and on par with or better than most of its contemporaries for the results delivered. The above issues are probably being mistaken for poor optimization, when they're just good old fashioned bugs. I have noticed some lighting flicker, particularly on transitions between areas or when environmental effects like storms are happening, but otherwise the game performs very well and delivers an immersive experience- perhaps too dark (for comparison, in the trailers you can usually see everything, in game the world feels dark- I'm not sure I want it as bright as the trailers, but at default settings the darkness is overwhelming and the flashlight does next to nothing), and while I appreciate scary dark it often gets into painful to navigate dark. The memory leak does cause the game to grind to a halt, but the minute to minute performance is actually pretty good, and in my experience I would speculate the game will probably run at or even below listed specs.

Gameplay wise, STALKER 2 is very similar to the previous games, with one major and disappointing shortcoming- the A Life system seems to be basically absent. While there are environmental dynamics, the radio chatter, persistent characters, and "living zone" are replaced with sometimes rather jarring spawns. For example, one time I attacked a location as an emission hit. While I hid inside in a room, waiting for the storm to pass, I wondered what the AI outside were up to. Well, apparently nothing, as the moment the emission ended, they were milling about well outside the building, with no sign of taking cover. No getting wiped out by the emission, no opening the door to find a bunch of angry soldiers waiting for me, just a janky placement of some AI wandering around. There is still environmental reactivity and dynamic encounters that can be quite unpredictable, so I'm not going to say it's a total failure, and it's still better than most open world games *most* of the time, but it does not live up to the legacy of the previous STALKER games, which is disappointing.

These caveats out of the way, let's get into why I recommend the game.

However, the gunplay is classic STALKER with a modern twist, the UI is functional and clean, looting and exploring is the same risk-reward cycle, and the story is reminiscent of the original STALKER games with multiple factions and story paths. Stakes are tense and high, monsters are terrifying, and STALKERs are stalking. The game looks and feels like the nostalgic version of STALKER that I had in my head, and it is a truly impressive graphical display. The story is another dive into Chornobyl and the world is beautiful, horrible, and fantastic all at the same time. The adrenaline highs, the suspense, the tension are all at their peak, and while the game really does feel less robust because of some of the missing parts and performance issues, it is still an incredible experience and one which I would buy again for sure, and that's why I'm recommending it. Admittedly I do have a sense of nostalgia for the original STALKER games, but there is some real quality here- the interactions between characters, the cutscenes, the storytelling, the world and its creatures are all compelling and convincing in a way open world games often fail to deliver on, and the attention to detail, the mechanics and systems that work well, the tension are all there. Running from a grenade, clearing a jam, hunting an invisible monster, ducking behind a boulder to reload while bandits flank towards you on both sides- these moments feel just as tense, adrenaline pounding, and immersive as ever, and the highlights far outweigh the problems, which hopefully can be addressed in future patches (and to be clear I don't review games on the expectations of future patches, it's just that I believe that those problems are fixable, while the game itself is strong enough even with them to be worth recommending).

If you are averse to bugs and crashes and experiencing them will ruin your fun, I'd still recommend the game, though with the caveat that you may want to wait for some patches to iron out the issues. But if you're fine putting up with a bit of jank and enjoyed the previous STALKER games, it's an easy recommendation. Just be aware that you may want to proactively restart the game every hour or two (depending on your RAM) and that saving often is your friend.

Update: Frame generation seems to be the culprit behind the slowing frame rate. Additionally, adjusting the brightness did resolve a lot of complaints about the overly dark environments (while still making actually dark spaces dark enough to work from a gameplay perspective). Having finished the game I can now recommend more fully as the story, though perhaps a little "soft sci fi" for some people, is very compelling and ties the franchise together well with strong choice driven branching paths based on your faction alignments.

If you enjoyed Starfield as it is before getting this DLC, you'll enjoy this. Also, I won't be marking spoilers about the base game, but I also won't spoil anything with the expansion itself in this review. If you haven't played the base game, though, there may be a few things in here focused more on mechanics than story that might come up that will possibly be confusing.

I don't think Shattered Space is a bad expansion. If you weigh it solely on the merits of its own content, then it's... fine. But the problem is it's married to an underwhelming game. I'm not even arguing that the expansion itself should take on the obligation of fixing all the problems with Starfield, but it's notable that the expansion is one planetary space (and a very good one, in the context of Starfield) without any new outpost or space content. I don't think it's fair to critique the Creations credits system that paywalls "official" content (for dubious value) here either, but it is worth noting that a $30 DLC and a $70 game are not the full experience... though what the Creations add is of dubious value anyway. But for a game that seems to think that the package deal is worth $100 I think it's fair to expect a well built, integrated expansion and this just doesn't live up to that.

Positives are that the expansion mostly respects your time. There's a few fetch quest-y missions but those are used to give more opportunities to communicate lore and story and so I don't think those are odious in the way, for example, the fetch-quest-y temple grind of the base game. The story is mostly good, and the environmental design is great. The new enemy type is interesting to fight (not the phantoms, we'll get to that in a moment) and the first set piece, Oracle Station, is legitimately a great experience. Additionally, the new city is one of the better urban spaces in Starfield, and while it isn't perfect, it does have a sense of actual activity and history that makes it feel more immersive than other urban spaces in the game. Additionally, the new zone (similar in size to a randomly generated landing zone, but populated with actual content) doesn't feel copy paste in the way the base game does.

That's about where the positives end. While most of Shattered Space is well written and feels fine, there are some lackluster bits. Phantoms in particular are the most common "new" enemy, but these are just teleporting versions of ordinary Va'ruun troops, not entirely dissimilar to another enemy type encountered in the base game's main story, just a lot more common. Additionally, while the story starts off with a strong cosmic horror theme, the ending devolves into illusions of choice and a cliche political power struggle centered around a megalomaniac that feels more cartoonish than compelling. It's the kind of disappointment that could have been avoided by learning lessons from other games, but was not for some reason.

Additionally, there's very little new content beyond the storyline. While the story is passable up until the last chapter when it begins to feel forced and shallow, if you're expecting to take some fancy new toys into the base game or find some new modules for building your ship or anything beyond a few slight variations on existing equipment (I think there's a few Va'ruun themed modifications of some Settled Systems equipment and a fleshing out of some Va'ruun armor sets, but I'm not even sure what I think is new actually is, since most weapons and armor sets in the base game are pretty forgettable) you're not going to get it here. I'm not going to blame Shattered Space for not fixing the base game's lackluster outposts or space gameplay, but I do think it's weird that there's very little new content related to the new area to bring back to the main game.

Ultimately, my decision to not recommend Shattered Space has little to do with the quality, it's more to do with the price. I enjoyed my, for example, first five hours of Shattered Space, and while I am very disappointed by the ending, the side quests and area are still fine. But for $30 I expect more than roughly fifteen hours of content (a generous estimate for completionist- I finished the story on a new file in about eight hours, and that includes the intro and some early game chores and going in about 25 levels below recommended, though not all optional quests). That's basically half of a full price new game like Space Marine 2 or at least one interesting indie game.

If there was something to pull out from the expansion to make the base game fresh or interesting, like new weapon types or abilities or at least one new system, it would maybe be compelling, but it's more like a stand alone expansion tacked onto a game, and the game it's tacked onto isn't very compelling itself. Coupled with the bad taste of a generic and forgettable ending and a failure to stick to the cosmic horror theme (past the first few encounters it begins to devolve into pretty standard Starfield game play which basically means plinking away at enemies who plink away at you, and the AI is pretty tragic still) lets down some actually good environmental design and world building.

TL;DR: Doesn't add enough to be worth $30, if you really enjoyed Starfield it's going to be more of the same for you to enjoy but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it at sticker price.