Recent reviews by Taracmeden

As an open world racing series with beautiful graphics, Forza Horizon is unique. It is not particularly challenging to progress in the game, but Forza Horizon has always been more of a playground.

If you want a low stress racing game that happens to have some of the most beautiful graphics in gaming, this is perfect.

I've sunk unknown hundreds to thousands of hours into the various editions of this game over the course of the past 20 years. It has improved vastly since launch and is still getting support...AFTER 20 YEARS. I love it, and I will keep loving it for at least a few more years

If you like RTSs, get this. Get this. GET THIS.

It is worth the price. As a subscription-free MMO that is not P2W, you can easily sink enough hours into this game to make the full price feel worth it. The game has a good premise and a great engine/core, but there iis plenty about the game that will grind your gears
Pros:
Beautiful for an MMO
Great combat...the PvP is just so satisfying
Player-run economy
Great variation between certain zones

Cons:
walking...so...much...walking
bugs that pop up at the worst times
Bots everywhere - want to harvest some ore? Bot's been there...want to fish? Bot's there...
standard MMO toxicity
Unbalanced towns...some towns receive significantly more traffic than other towns and as a result are rarely traded hands as the controlling company can easily afford to get its members the best gear.

Overall, it is worth the price, and looks like it will improve in coming months.

VIEW UPDATE BELOW
An absolutely beautiful dumpster fire of a game on launch. It has improved, but not by much. If it is on sale for under 35 bucks, give it a try, but dont go out of your way to buy this game.
This game is the gold standard for how NOT to release and maintain a game. Here's to hoping against hope that this game goes the No Man's Sky route.

EDIT 10/15/2023: So the game did go the No Man's Sky route. I would say that the game is definitely worth getting now in it's 2.0 state. Most of the bugs and issues have been fixed, and the world feels much more alive now.
Phantom Liberty has a great story and the verticality missing from the vanilla map is there in the DLC map. Thank you CD Projekt Red for getting your act together.
The game still has the occasional issue, but it is now worth a shot

This game is absolutely amazing. There are some bugs from time to time, but they are very minor and no where near the level of other AAA titles that came out in the past year.
The story, characters, voices, combat, etc is just so well done and satisfying. I'm not much of a deep-diving Marvel fan, and I usually speed through story content to get to the combat, but I found myself listening to every conversation, skipping no cutscene, and looking for all lore items.
The humor, 80s aesthetic was absolutely great! I cant say enough good things about this game. This is definitely a must buy.

The only downside of this game is that it is so short. Even with trying to grab collectibles/etc, I was done with the game in under 20 hours. For a game that was so well executed in every way that counts, it isnt too big of a deal.

I will be updating this review as I explore this expansion and its future patches:
First Impression: Despite the hugely devoted fanbase of Microsoft's Age of series, they seem to have put almost no effort in this expansion. The cutscenes of the campaign look like the sloppily assembled work of a kid new to the map editor. Hell, the skybox is absent from the first cutscene! I mean one of the companies working on the game is CALLED Skybox!!!
Now lets forget, for the moment, the fact that the voice-acting sounds like a bunch of non-chinese barely trying to pull off a convincing Chinese accent (forget regional accents)...you can barely hear them over the loud "background" music (granted it does sound nice, but music does not advance the plot of this game).
The concept is amazing. The chinese have a very rich history and a very complex and alluring mythology. It is something to be treated with respect and devotion, not utter carelessness.

As if the devs treating this initial release as an unofficial public beta isnt bad enough, multiplayer does not work at all...I can not get through one single game without it "desync"ing. It used to work just fine, but after the latest patch, I can kiss a multiplayer experience goodbye.

Microsoft, PLEASE fix this game. I have so many good memories from it. Please dont go all EA on us.

Been around a decade since this game has been released and it is still the bomb!