Recent reviews by Jackie Daytona

I ran out of space on my Gunpla shelf in real life so I bought this. Now I can mash together random kits without buying 12 copies of each one. pp hard

I like this one more than I thought I would. The gathering isn't too annoying, there's not any crafting I've found that takes ages to do. I've been enjoying the setting, the design, the overall theme and aesthetic. In my mind, I keep likening it to The Secret World, before that unpleasant "Legends" relaunch.

I wasn't bothered by the social media outrage over a bog standard privacy policy. Like other well known people have pointed out - unless you live in a country that would make you provide them with your ID, that doesn't apply to you. Don't want them to know about your twitch, Twitter, discord, whatever? Then don't link them to the game.

Then there are the planned wipes. I get it, losing progress can be disheartening. You don't care about Eternaland, "it's just a pointless lobby!" you say. I'll admit, my knee-jerk reaction was to be upset about it too.

What changed my mind started with the group your character is supposed to be part of. The Mayflies. Creatures that emerge in swarms and live short, desperate lives. What follows is only my personal interpretation of the setup, and maybe I'll change my mind after a seasonal reset or two.

The game makes no secret of it, the world will end at the conclusion of the season, the Great Ones will destroy everything. The players will drift from the shattered reality to their refuge outside of time and space, Eternaland. Cosmic horror choice, do you sit unchanging outside of time forever, alone, or do you venture forth to the next doomed reality and try to change its fate.

It has the bones of a decent looter shooter, the characters I've been able to try have mostly been fun to play, not too many abilities that make me question why the even exist, gun play is adequately fun, etc. However, the way it's set up, this feels like it has to be the only game you play in order to grind out things for free, or you whip out your wallet and drop $10-$20 on a new character. Both options have the huge potential downside of you hating the play-style after you unlock it.

The bad-feels icing on this cake is, it's a Nexon game. They've just famously had legal trouble over their drop chances in other games being misleading, and they have a habit of shutting down popular games that failed to make all the money.

It's free to start, so ultimately you have to decide for yourself if you want to commit the time or money on this. About six hours in and I think I'm done. In my opinion, there are better free-to-start games out there, and a number of paid experiences I'd rather spend my time or money on.

I would recommend this game to some players. There are a few questions you really have to ask yourself before giving it a shot.

Did you play the original Dragon's Dogma and love it, warts and all?

Would you say you want a game that doesn't hold your hand - and actually mean it?

Are you the type who can enjoy grinding out levels against a handful of enemies that get modest visual and stat changes throughout the game?

Can you find joy in weird, silly, obtuse and even sometimes dumb writing?

Can you deal with intentionally janky and obtuse systems?

If you answered "No" to any of those, then this probably won't be the game for you. Much like the first game, Dragon's Dogma 2 has a narrow audience it's trying to reach. Which makes it all the more confusing that Capcom decided to market this game like it was going to be the next blockbuster action rpg hit. That's only the start of questionable decisions Capcom made with this title. Making this their first $70 title? Including pointless microtransactions? That combination can be its own separate topic.

We dropped some bad things from the first, like notice board quests. Which were almost exclusively "kill 25 x" or "find 10 y" types. One thing we lost that was pretty cheesy was Torpor and the Rusted weapon line, the secret best weapons in the game.

There are undeniably some rough edges, for sure, however I don't agree with the levels of negativity some folks are pointing at this title. You'd think Rook jumped out of their game, ♥♥♥♥ in their fridge and punched them for the number of reviewers acting like this title was a personal slight against them.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game I always come back to. Something comfortable to slip back in to. No matter how long I spend away for work or just playing other titles, the core experience is always there to bring me right back in.

It's helped by an uncommonly positive community. When I come back and need to shake the rust off, it's pretty rare for anyone to tear my head off if I make a mistake, or I'm not playing optimally, which is something most people have experienced elsewhere.

It's a game where I don't think I'll ever see everything it has to offer. I'm not going to finish every piece of side content, I doubt I'll level every job up, don't think I'll finish the towers, or get into the hardest endgame raid modes. I can just putter along at my own pace, and do the content that interests me.

With a little luck, I'll even be caught up on the MSQ by the time the next expansion comes out.

Ghost Recon Wildlands is fun for a while. But then faults start to show through the seams. It's an open world game with the gameplay mechanics of a linear third person cover shooter.

I've had a dozen instances where I thought I'd sneak up to a base across the unpaved terrain, only to end up stuck in a little hole made by rocks. No way to get out thanks to a missing jump feature, and the fact that the game didn't recognize any of these rocks trapping me as cover, so I couldn't vault over them.

Although it billed as being a game you can play alone, you would be best served by having at least one human with you. There was a mission that tasked me with stopping a convoy in order to grab and interrogate a cartel member. And I had to replay this mission nearly a dozen times, because every approach I took saw my AI team mates killing the capture target while ignoring his minigun equipped escort vehicle.

The enemy AI and detection has serious issues as well. I have watched hostile npcs and my AI team mates bump into each other and get stuck on each other without setting off any alarms or raising any suspicion. Meanwhile, I've experienced being spotted through buildings as well as having hostile npcs look right at me without any recognition of my presence. These inconsistencies make planning your approach to an objective difficult, if not pointless.

The weapon collection system is built around the microntransactions available in the in-game store. Picking up a weapon from a fallen enemy doesn't add it to your collection, nor can you customize the one you found with any parts. Oh no, if you want a weapon, you have to figure out which province it's in, choose between looking up it's exact location online or huting down intel until it gives you the "Weapon and Attachment" option to add 30 more icons to your map, make your way out there, and find the mystical urweapon of the weapon you want.

Or you can just convert real money to Ghost Points or whatever and get papa Ubisoft to unlock everything for you.

I would say this would be a game to get on sale, but by the time it is actually on sale there won't be anyone playing, and you'll be stuck with the wretched AI.

A great, classic game, which is still receiving mod support to this day. If you've never played it, buy it and learn to love it. If you've played it before, reinstall it and go through it again, try that clan you've always put off.

One can only hope that the current owners of the IP (Paradox Interactive) actually do something with the World of Darkness, and they don't pull a CCP and let it sit for years before selling it off.

This is a Bethesda game, through and through. It has been released with hundreds of bugs, including those that can and will make some unlucky people's saves unplayable. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition continues the longstanding and proud Bethesda tradition of releasing a lukewarm mess of a game, and then just expecting the community to fix everything for them.

The bugs that existed in the original version of the game are still present, as well as brand new bugs. There was no effort put in to improve texture quality, animations, scripting or engine errors.

I played the game on Ultra settings (in a 1920x1080 window, then in fullscreen after grabbing a different monitor to plug in, because why bother supporting the growing number of 21:9 monitors in the gaming market?) with all of the "fancy new grafix" options turned as high as they can go. This effect can sort of be replicated by playing the original with the high-res texture dlc, and then rubbing a little bit of pepper in your eyes so everything is just slightly blurry.

You may be thinking, "But you have to go into the .ini files and fiddle with things to make it look better!" To which I have to ask, if the big selling point of the re-release is supposed to be how they made it look nicer, then haven't they failed that goal by making it so that you have to edit game files by hand to change options?

Some of the new effects they've tried hard to sell the game on, like the snow shader, are hilariously bad. It looks less like snow and more like the player character is walking around on a white sheet with a small radius of glitter that follows them around. It cuts off a few feet from the player, and in some cases the effect is only visible when looking directly at the snow from the correct angle. Worse, it doesn't interact with all the new lighting effects they crammed in.

As far as mods go, they learned nothing from Fallout 4's implementation of bethesda.net. Be prepared for a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of amateurs hurriedly uploading old mods for the re-release and for consoles, which will probably lead to more modders doing that thing where they get upset, delete all their mods and quit releasing things forever. It's a good idea to just get on the Nexus, download all of your old favorites and store them away on a flash drive or spare hard drive, so you can still revisit Skyrim classic in the future.

Even getting this for free, I'd still prefer to play the old version that already had a ton of community support. It's hard to say this is even worth $40 on PC, and forget about paying an absolutely criminal $60 for the console release. At this point, Bethesda is actively trying to destroy the (frankly undeserved) good will they used to have.

Who knows, maybe the modding community will continue to fix Bethesda's games, and maybe the special edition will become something special. But that's not what a review is for, it's for the game as it stands on its own, and the product they shipped is inexcusable. But it won't change, Bethesda has too many fans who will do nothing but heap praise on them for a minimum effort re-release who are simply eager to make more waifus and pose them under nicer lighting for fapping.