Recent reviews by Thalestr

So. Much. Annoying. Story. And. Cutscenes. Words cannot express how little I care about cringey, unskippable story fluff in racing games. Over an hour of mandatory tutorial content before just being able to drive freely. Can't stand it.

A good game with a continuation of the first's great story, characters, and world/lore but with some caveats I've noticed while playing. This is just a critique of what I think are the game's weaknesses but I still enjoy it and recommend it as a whole.

Several aspects of FW's gameplay mechanics are, for lack of a better way of putting it, outdated. The focus on crafting, RPG stat elements, over-abundance of worthless loot, etc are all stale and tired mechanics that hold this game back. I read in another review that someone recommended turning the combat difficulty down so you don't have to worry as much about build optimisation and loot quality and I've found that does indeed make the game more enjoyable. Taking a detour away from a super important story quest to kill some random machines or wild animals to improve basic gear was a complaint people had with the first game and it continues here, if not even moreso. Horizon takes too many notes from other loot-choked games like Assassin's Creed instead of forging its own path. My inventory and stash are an overflowing mountain of random crap that I have no idea the function of and I frankly couldn't care less. Turning down the difficulty a smidge so I can focus on other things has helped. The beautiful world and story are FW's biggest strengths and these mechanics are bloat that weigh it down

Combat remains good and felling machines feels as satisfying as the first game, although I found some of the new machine designs difficult to parse. If it wasn't for the massive glowing weakspots I would have no idea what does what. They range from being mildly obtuse to being absolute fusterclucks of greeble and particle effects that I can't even tell what animal they're supposed to emulate or what. There are not enough visual cues to tell, at a glance, what part of a machine is important or a possible threat. And no, stopping mid-fight to read a machine's user manual in your notebook is not a good alternative. Additionally, Cauldrons also share this issue and are a visually incomprehensible mess. More than once I've had to look at a tutorial just to figure out what the hell I was looking for. I know they are, as per the lore, not supposed to be human-inhabitable places but this is a human-playable game and it still matters.

Climbing/parkour has been improved and Aloy can scale a lot more than she could in the first game. Most rocky surfaces can be climbed (with or without visual assist from the Focus) or you can bunnyhop your way up in many cases. There is still quite a lot of jank though, as it is difficult to tell when Aloy will snap onto a climbable object or sail right past it. I have failed a lot of jumps because there was no indication if Aloy was going to attach to the thing I was jumping towards and I wasn't close enough by a few centimetres.

The game also needs a bug squishing pass... or 3. I haven't had any issues with essential quests yet but I have encountered several side quests that required a save reload or I had to walk away from entirely because they are impassable. I have also had Aloy get stuck in walls or under objects and have had to reload for those too. Also a few strange visual bugs like physics objects on Aloy's outfit twitching and flapping erratically.

Lastly, and this is a minor quibble, but way too many quest have an annoying "twist" to them. It would be nice to have more quests where Aloy goes to a location to do something and just does it instead of needing to do extra busywork like rescuing someone, tracking a machine, doing an additional quest chain, etc. Sometimes it makes story sense but sometimes I can tell it was done to pad length and it can be quite tedious. This could perhaps be included in the game having tired, outdated design choices as other games of this genre have done this too.

One of my favourites, and I'm not even that much of a puzzle person. Wonderful and engaging story with a refreshing take on some classic ideas - I won't say more to avoid spoilers. Gorgeous music, environments, and stellar performance from Cissy Jones who voices the protag.

Only complaint I have is some of the puzzles are extremely obtuse and will very likely require an online guide if you're not puzzle-minded. It's also not particularly long either, but it's also not expensive so that balances out.

Perhaps not the deepest or most engaging of storylines, but jaw-dropping visual design, animation, and characters. Gameplay is fluid with satisfying combat with new mechanics introduced at a steady and constant pace to keep you learning.

Also super adorable. You can put hats on the Rot.

Holy hell. I got it on sale for $4 and I still feel ripped off. The game constantly tries to connect to online services when opening any menu and when first starting the game, wasting 30-40 seconds each time and then subsequently failing to connect. There is an unskippable cutscene on startup as well, to make things worse.

Then the game kept softlocking me on the first mission so I restarted the game to try and fix it, sat through all the BS to get the game going again, only to see my save was wiped.

I feel bad for the artists that worked hard on this game only to have their work ♥♥♥♥ on by this corporate trash.

The latest update at the time of writing added AMD FSR, which is an upscaler. Odyssey now defaults to the "performance' FSR option which, if you run the game at 1080p, will actually run your game at 720p and upscale it in an attempt to claw back some performance. This is their band-aid fix to the crushing performance issues Odyssey has.

I would say avoid Odyssey until they fix these issues, but instead I'll phrase it like this: Avoid Odyssey until they actually figure out *how* to fix these issues, because right now they don't. The time between updates gets longer and longer each time and gamebreaking issues are not being fixed.

And despite numerous outreachings from the developer and even the CEO himself regarding community interaction and transparency, the studio still remains frustratingly tight-lipped at the best of times, and dead silent for... well, basically all the time. Nobody knows what is going on in the studio, why the expansion is in the state it's in, or when we can actually expect fixes.

It is baffling to me that this is the same studio that makes Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, which are excellent and so polished in comparison. Elite always was a flawed but lovable game, but Odyssey is... something else entirely. Something you should save your money on.

I was sceptical about picking this up for two reasons. Firstly, because the PC port had a very rough launch and there are still complaints of issues popping up from time to time. Secondly, because I wasn't sure if the idea of fighting robots would really be that enjoyable past a few hours or less.

Well, regarding the first concern, it seems they've done good job at patching this up and getting it into a more playable state. I'm about 20 hours into the game now and I've yet to encounter a single bug or crash. The worst I have seen is a floating bush or piece of scenery here and there, and such things are really rare. I'm not sure if my hardware has anything to do with my lack of issues, so I will say that I'm using an RX 5700 8GB, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD Ryzen 3600.

Regarding the second concern - this is where I think the game has done a great job. You are a very young hunter armed with only a few traps, bows, and a spear, going up against massive technologically advanced robots that look like they could topple entire buildings. I think the way the game handles this bizarre juxtaposition is pretty clever. If you run head-on at enemy machines with your spear swingin', you will almost certainly die - especially at higher difficulties (there are many, including New Game+). Even if you vastly outlevel the enemy, this tactic will still get you beat up pretty good. The key to survival and victory is to handle each enemy on a case-by-case basis and to learn and know their strengths and weaknesses. From using specialised arrows to bust off parts of the robots or using fire to set their fuel stores alight - the way you take these mechanical beasts done is both satisfying and entertaining. Especially when they collapse to the ground with a gratifying thump of jingling parts and sparks. You can attack the machines from a more aggressive angle, dancing around them while strategically damaging them enough to kill them, or you can move in the shadows and thin the herd one-by-one through target analysis and well placed spear jabs. Combat is fast, hectic, and the bigger bots can take off 3/4 of your health in a single swipe of their metal claws or jaws.

As for the other usual stuff: Graphics are incredible and the attention to detail is astounding. Everything on Aloy's body has physics applied, from her hair down to the small beads that hang from her bow. She shivers when it's cold and complains when she has water in her boots. Her movement is entirely terrain-dependant and she will interact with foliage when moving through the world. I find this sort of thing important in a game where you will be spending hours looking at a character through a third-person perspective. I'm not sure what my frame rate is as I'm not running a FPS counter when I play, but I'd say it's floating around 60 with everything but AA and shadows maxed. They have improved the performance with patches but apparently this game is a system hog, so if you have lower specs you might want to make sure you stay within your 2-hour return window just in case.

The sound and music are good, although I will say that I wish the audio quality on voice lines was higher. You can tell that the audio is compressed and not mastered as good as everything else. It's a minor complaint and it doesn't really detract from the rest of the game, but it is noteworthy.

One last thing I wanted to note. The game has a fast travel system but it requires resources, which I think is awesome. You need to craft travel packs that have things for your travel such as meat and materials. Seems like a great way of having a fast travel system while avoiding the teleport-everywhere issue that Skyrim had.

The non-VR portion is free so it costs nothing to give this a look but, honestly, it's still not worth it. It somehow makes one of the most colourful and beautiful places on earth look like a foggy, bland, depressing mess.

Not to mention the controls are not remappable nor are they even listed anywhere. Also invisible walls EVERYWHERE.

A peaceful and calm little adventure romp set on a beautiful island paradise. It is absolutely incredible how good this game looks considering most of the game world was created by two or three people, from my understanding.

My biggest concerns with this being a small indie team were how good the voice acting was and how janky the playing felt. The voice acting is actually better than I expected, with the biggest issue probably being the ocasional character that has much louder lines than others. As for jankiness - the game isn't perfect but it's not bad either. Character feels a little floaty but you can sprint, crouch, and hop slightly for clearing small obstacles. The painting mechanic is pretty cool and it's awesome seeing your work hanging in character's houses. The music is also great.

Also it has some LGBTQ+ inclusivity too, so that's a huge + in my book.

EULA changed to allow collection of personal information not critical to game function. Avoid.