Recent reviews by C-Nort75

Are you frustrated with the Star Wars sequel trilogy? Are you hankering for a taste of the good old days with Luke, Leia, Han Solo, and Darth Vader? Are you interested in saving the galaxy, or maybe even enjoying the feeling of power you get when crushing the "insignificant Rebellion"?

I've been playing Star Wars Rebellion since it first came out in 1998, just two years after I built my first PC in '96. I know it's hard for some to believe but there was actually a time when SW Rebellion was pushing the edge of tech and computers were having trouble keeping up. The 3D combat we now see as basic and clunky was state-of-the-art at the time. My PC had a difficult time rendering SW Rebellion battles back then. I could play it, but the space battles would freeze or crash too often. In the end my 1996 computer was like the "little engine that could" and chug-a-lugged along eventually allowing me to finish the game. Now here we are in 2020. I have a pretty darn good PC with Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 2070 Super, 1TB Rocket Gen 4.0 m.2, and I STILL find myself wanting to play this old game, and I still love it.

For me Jedi: Fallen Order fulfilled the majority of its promises. It does everything EA claimed it would do and it does it pretty darn well. The game is extremely easy on the eyes with plenty of top-notch art and excellent motion capture tech. The acting is excellent, the graphics are excellent, the sound design is excellent, and the story is also very good. For me the games negative attributes have mostly to do with it’s lack of open-world style options. Players used to open world games in the style of Star Wars The Old Republic, GTA V, Skyrim, or the Red Dead Redemption series might quickly become frustrated with the story-on-a-rail style game Fallen Order is. Jedi: Fallen Order has much more in common with the Uncharted series than it does Knights of the Old Republic, so..be warned.

I was pleased there were no loot boxes of any kind in the game, no multiplayer to muddy things up, and nothing holding the player back from advancing the story. There have been times in games similar in overall design to Fallen Order where the player might get stuck and not able to move forward. Batman: Arkham Origins comes to mind where I was stuck fighting one of the early boss battles (Deathstroke) and just could not get past them. It took 40 to 50 tries to figure out how to beat him. On the first run through the game became useless to me and I pretty much gave up trying to play any further, essentially wasting $40 hard earned dollars. Jedi Fallen Order does not suffer from this issue. In service of it’s story Fallen Order makes sure to steadily usher the player along for the ride. (I did eventually go back and beat Deathstroke but it was more than a year later)

Jedi: Fallen Order took me about 60.3 hours to finish from beginning to end. I completed about 97% of all goals. It is possible to rip through the game MUCH more quickly and finish the story in about 15 to 25 hours if the player has no interest in collecting the games cosmetic loot. Every map in Fallen Order is filled with loot chests that allow your character to change their outfit, poncho overcoat,droid’s colors, and the ships colors. You also find various lightsaber parts throughout the story allowing you to change the look of your blade color as well as its handle/hilt. These serve no practical purpose as far as functionality and do not give you any kind of bonus or otherwise. Players interested in nothing but story will probably make quick work of Jedi: Fallen Order.

For what it is Jedi: Fallen Order is extremely good at what it does. I did not have any graphics issues, I did not have a single game crash, everything worked surprisingly well. I ran the game on a i7-3770k, 16GB RAM, MSI R9 290 4GB, 1TB SSD with pretty much no problems. My display is 1080P 60 FPS and my rig was able to handle that with only occasional dips down around 45 FPS one in a while. I do have my GPU overclocked to around 1020MHz / 1260MHz memory clock.

In the end I would definitely recommend Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to anyone who enjoys Star Wars. Part of me wants to say I’d disappointed the game doesn’t last longer, but at 60.3 hours I paid about $1 per hour and I’ve spent much more money I much sillier things than a quality video game before. I can’t help but think my wanting more than 60 hours of gameplay is probably just me wishing I could keep playing the game on and on.

Like almost every other review for this game I'm giving it a BIG thumbs up as well. Its a gorgeous looking fun-to-play blast of a game! Want to single play for awhile? No problem. Want to team up with friends or strangers? Also no problem!

Now I'll get to the most important question people ask: Is this a typical pay-to-win loot box experience? No, not really. Yes you can buy equipment, no you do not HAVE to buy anything to play and win. As a matter of fact, it's at least arguable that purchasing equipment puts that player at a disadvantage compared to players who worked their way up and have tons of mods and know the maps like the back of their hands.

Unfortunately for me it was not 100% rainbows and sunshine all the way through, I did have a near game-breaking experience after a few days. About 40 hours in to the game I must have went into the settings and turned up my gpu controls. Suddenly my MSI R9 290 was cranking out almost 400 frames per second and the card shot up from a reasonable 50 to 60C until it maxed out around 90C+ and more. At those temps it didnt take long for my system to shut itself down pretty quickly. Sometimes it would just kick me out of the game only to start over, other times it was a full system lockup that only the reset button on the motherboard could fix.

I poked around on the internet for a while. I wish I could tell you I found a solution and was playing minutes later but honestly it took me a few days before I fixed it. It's one of those things where when you realize what it was it makes you feel stupid for not catching it right away. For me, I had turned VSync on which opened up the max frames per second. I mistakenly thought VSync would prevent the GPU from running away like a madman and keep the refresh around 60Hz...same as this old monitor Im using. NOPE.. Vsync in Warframe does very little. I fixed it by turning Vsync off and instead manually setting max framerates to 60Hz.

Now I'm back to normal temps and having a great time playing the game. Warframe is the best darn game you don't have to pay for!

As of the time of this review I have 275 hours in-game. Survival games make up a large part of my 130 Steam game library and I've played a range from 'dead awful' to 'amazingly awesome'. Subnautica is easily one of the best survival games I've yet played. First off, IT'S GORGEOUS! Everything in this game is beautiful from the clean and pristine look of the underwater habitats your character builds to pretty much everything in nature you see around you. The water looks great and the landscape under the water as well as just about everything that swims, floats, grows, or bites. The graphics of Subnautica make it probably the most beautiful game I own.

The story and lore are fantastic as is the voice acting. The biggest problem I have with the game is that there isn't more of it. Following the plot line through to it's conclusion doesn't actually take very long and I look forward to Unknown Worlds expanding the map to include even more biomes and new creatures. It would be REALLY amazing if they would add multiple plot lines and allow for the game to be played (and won) in many different ways. As of right now there is just one conclusion that ends the same for everyone who finishes the game. It would highly boost replayability if there were multiple ways to successfully finish player goals.

In conclusion Subnautica is a MUST OWN Steam game. When you buy a brand new expensive PC and want to show off what your killer GPU can do Subnautica is the game to load. The only problem is that you're going to want to keep playing when you're done with the demonstration!

I started playing LOTRO just a few weeks after it launched from Beta to full. I have to admit that I personally enjoyed the game a bit more before it switched over to Free to Play. I didn't mind paying a subscription fee for all the hours I spent wandering through the lands I had read about for years before the game came out. I read The Lord of the Rings many years before the movies came out and many times over at that. I also grew up playing D&D with my friends. My friend Bill's mother was dating a guy named Dean who had played D&D since the late 70's and was an expert Dungeon Master. It was just so great to have an adult DM that put weeks and months into planning. When one of our characters died Dean actually collected the character sheet and refused to return it, their were real consequences to dying.

The reason I mention all this is to point out that when I play LOTRO I'm commited to using my imagination and enjoying the game as if the books had come alive. I do not play LOTRO from the perspective of a gamer who is trying to succeed at winning a computer game. I play LOTRO as if my character is participating in Tolkiens world for real. For years I roamed around Middle Earth. I made it a habit of doing some of the things my character would do in the game. If I drank ale in the game I would drink one at home. If I grew and smoked pipeweed in the Shire I would pack a bowl and smoke weed at home. I spent years playing LOTRO extremely high. I've read that the pipeweed grown in the Shire is just tobacco, but the movie portrays it having a euphoric affect and that made more sense to me.


LOTRO is really very good game. It's not perfect but it's very good. There has been a good deal of care and detail put into this game. If you play it from a gaming perspective and just go for winning and leveling up this game's detail and Tolkien's signature depth are lost on you. When I play this game it's as if I can see where I am in my memory of Tolkiens work. People who will play this game primarily to level up and if they havent read the books or understand the locations.

I first reviewed DayZ way back on September 25th, 2014 and talked about how once I geared up I was afraid to engage other players for fear of losing the gear. Fast forward over three years since then and I have now put in just shy of 2700 of DayZ time. Sadly, I still get super geared up and fear getting killed by a superior combatant. I\ve focused on learning as much as I can about all of the gear in game. I've done everything from fishing to hunting wolves to sneaking past a large group of players to grab some Tisy military loot. I'm a lone-wolf by nature and spend most my time alone in the game, as I do in real life as well.

Enough about me, let me tell you about the game! DayZ is possibly the best game I've ever played. Every new software update brings players more and more reality. A player has to take care of themself in the game as in real life. You must eat, must drink, and must avoid injury and infection. When it comes to Infected dead you either avoid them or kill them, but with other players you have the choice of avoiding them, killing them, or even teaming up with them. You can take hostages using handcuffs, rope, or ducttape. You can torture other players, and you can even kill and eat them if that's what you want to do. Everything you do in DayZ has a consequence. If you eat people you have a high chance of getting a brain disease and going crazy. If you are a bandit or viscious killer you will eventually meet your match and wind up dead. If you try to go off on your own you will likely be found on a long enough time scale.

DayZ has something for everyone and honestly I just can't say enough about the game. You will hear about people upset with the pace of development. You will hear people complain the game is still Alpha coming up on four years, but if you want something really amazing time and lots of effort has to go into it. I've recently seen footage of the new version 0.63 that will ultimately serve as Beta test version for the game and it looks amazing. I have not yet seen another game that even looks like DayZ 0.63 with its advanced physics and choice of viewing angles. DayZ has come a long way since Dean started working on his Arma II mod, and honestly in the genre of Survival games you will not find a better game.

I have to warn people who haven't bought the game yet: if you have spent a good amount of time playing combat games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, Quake, Doom, and Far Cry where you spawn in and either have guns or quickly find guns and immediately engage in a deathmatch where you kill as many as fast as possible until someone else kills you then DayZ is probably not for you. People who come over from those games and want nothing more than to gear up and kill as many other players as possible tend to find DayZ to slow and troublesome for their taste. DayZ is a slow-burn game that requires skill and patience no matter how hard you try. There once was a time when it was possible to spawn in and find guns and start shooting shortly after, but that was the early days when the developers were focused on combat physics and needed a good deal of data and feedback. That phase is over and they have moved on to making the game as realistic as possible..infected humans aside and all.. If you want to gear up and kill ASAP then you should go ahead and buy Public Battlegrounds or HIZ1: King of the Kill.

I hope this helps. If you've read this far and DayZ is for you then feel free to send me a friend request. I'm happy to friend anyone who's interested in playing DayZ...or any of my 128 games really. Good luck survivors!

Check the sheer number of reviews that say the game essentially ends for them at the first boss - Deathstroke. I played through Batman Arkham City three times and I've faced some tough bosses with Batman before but Deathstroke in this game is different. I've tried to kill him over 300 times and I've never come close. I gave up and quit the game. If a boss is so hard that you can't get past him after 300 tries it's time to admit you suck and it's never going to be fun for you. I have 90 other games in my library to play that I'm good at and are all better than this game including two other Batman titles. In my opinion making Deathstroke such a difficult boss was a game dev mistake.