Recent reviews by Toasty

Who's the real enemy here?
The Hussites?
The Turks?
The cult?
The struggle with alcoholism?
The literal demon from hell?

Or your cheating wife?

10/10 Slovakian simulator.

It's nice having all three games not just remastered, but in one package. It's nice being able to relive one of the best video game RPGs and stories. It's nice getting the old gang back together.

It's less nice getting to the end and knowing it's over.

It's even less nice knowing that the Bioware that created this no longer exists, and that we'll never get a game or story of this caliber out of Bioware ever again.

Pour one out, homies.

It's boring. It's janky. The AI is goofy. It takes a LOT of getting used to. Sometimes you get decently far into building a town without developing something important and it really bites you.

It's also weirdly therapeutic.

Most of my playtime was on an overheating laptop in a shipping container office in the california desert. It was nice.

Come for the high-stakes prop-hunt.
Stay for the immersive environment and the mind-bending story.
And the jellied eels.

A friend gifted me this game a few years ago, and, being stupid, I never played it until now. It's a shame this game didn't do well financially because it is absolutely fantastic. I've never played another game quite like this. The original Bioshock might come close, especially when it comes to a layered story that you slowly piece together from half-truths, but even that didn't have the level of mechanical sophistication that Prey does. There are so many player abilities and environmental paths and workarounds that Talos is your art-deco oyster to crack open as you see fit.

Provided something else doesn't crack YOU open first.

Get it on sale.

Get it for the soundtrack.

Get it for the vibes.

Get it for the unique experience of being a deep-space trucker who's also heavily armed and trigger happy.

It feels a little wonky and unfinished. Get it anyway.

Possibly the most aggressively mid game I've ever played.

It's not bad.
It's not good either.
It's actually kind of boring.
I feel no excitement or revulsion about this game. Just... apathy. I wanted to love it. I really did. I replayed New Vegas multiple times, and I was excited to see what Obsidian could do making their own stylized, retro-futuristic world, and my consistent reaction the entire time I've been playing is "This is it? This is all they could do?"

It looks, feels, and plays like an overly ambitious Fallout 4 mod. It feels weirdly cramped, confined, and empty. And not in a good, desolate, atmospheric "empty" kind of way, just the vague impression that there SHOULD be more, and there isn't. Locking you into first-person perspective was a weird choice, especially since an idle-cam was included and they clearly want you to spend time marveling at all the goofy and "cool" things you can equip... but maybe it was for the best because there's not actually that much variety in the game. Whether it's your wardrobe, your weapons, your environments, or your enemies, it gets stale FAST. There's a lot of reused assets, a lot simple palette swaps, and a lot of padding. And while Bethesda or Capcom are sometimes guilty of the same things, they make up for it by drawing you in with intriguing stories, fun worlds, and interesting characters.
Outer Worlds has none of that. Obsidian took the tongue-in-cheek satire of Fallout and cranked it up to absolutely Loony Tunes levels. The dialogue gets old quickly, as do the fetch quests. The least annoying NPC is possibly your repurposed cleaning droid that now helps you murder marauders as you grind your way to the next quest line. Expecting the masterful factional interplay you got to observe in New Vegas, where even the brutal Caesar's Legion and utterly self-serving House would start to make sense? Well you'll be disappointed. The attempt is there, but it's just... flat. The whole game feels flat.

Again, it's NOT bad. But it feels utterly forgettable, and when I got to the point where I felt like I had to MAKE myself keep playing it, because I just totally lost interest, I knew that I couldn't really recommend it. The closest I got to fun was equipping my entire party with Spacer's Choice moon man heads.

I wish there was a rating between Yes and No for recommendation, because this one, for me, is squarely in the middle.
I would absolutely say that it's worth getting on sale. But even for it's relatively low regular price... man, I just don't know.

It's a lot of fun. The driving is really well optimized, the world is big, open, empty, barren, and you can rampage pretty much all over....
The graphics are decent, the aesthetic is absolutely on point, and the design of both the cars and raiders are perfect. It's also a lot more fun than you'd expect to be upgrading your main car into an totally custom monster. On foot, it's basically the Arkham games, so if you like that combat feel, style and mechanic, you'll feel right at home (and that's not a bad thing). On wheels, everything handles really well too, and the cars feel heavy and drifty like you'd expect from scrap-metal machines running in the desert.

But holy balls, it is REPETITIVE. The SAME enemies. The SAME other cars. The SAME missions. The SAME strongholds just in slightly different layouts. I'm usually pretty forgiving about repetition if the fun at least outweighs it (looking at you, Dragon's Dogma franchise), but I'm not entirely sure it does. By the hundredth open-road combat where you're giving yourself carpal tunnel trying to carefully harpoon the same enemy dune-buggy pre-runner the same way you've harpooned the last two dozen, the novelty starts to wear off. The story beats are amazing; the tone, the voice acting, and the whole vibe is just... chef's kiss. But then they would end, and I'd be back to fighting the same types of cars on the road, or the same types of enemies, Arkham style, in their strongholds, ad infinitum.

So maybe I'm just not playing it right, or long enough... or maybe it's a surprisingly accurate idea of what the wasteland would ACTUALLY be: A constant daily struggle of the same obstacles, punctuated by oddly memorable moments.

A (nearly) perfect remaster of the classic. Mafia was the first open-world RPG I had ever played as a kid.
Some folks wrote it off as a jumped-up GTA clone, but it was very unique, leagues ahead of most other games at the time, and featured wild mechanics that really pulled you in. It's probably one of the few driving games in existence where it's actually MORE beneficial to drive the speed limit than it is to break it.

The original was as close as you could get to a fully-interactive film, and this is a very faithful remaster.

It was really cool seeing such a ground-breaking game get the upgrade treatment, and the additional story beats and quests they added in are so seamless that I actually had to go back and reach which chapters were new and which I had just forgotten.
The graphics are good, the story's incredible, the controls are JUST tight enough that they're good, but loose enough that things still feel a little haphazard. Which makes sense: You're not an army sniper; you're a mafioso in a pinstripe suit. PLUS the Free Ride game mode is back, and it's even better now that the map is bigger, and they've added missions and achievements. In short, everything in this edition is bigger, better, and more visually stunning, AND it lets them incorporate some of the overlap between Mafia and Mafia II in a fun easter egg.

The cons:
The graphics - are still a little loopy in some spots. The mo-capped faces work like 80% of the time, but occasionally they'll look real weird.
The difficulty - actually feels a little less punishing than the original. Maybe it's just because I was a kid when I first encountered this game, but I remember the church and parking garage shootouts being a LOT harder in the original than they were in this edition. I played on normal difficulty and blasted through the main campaign pretty fast.
The mechanics - It's using the same engine as Mafia II, and they use the same mechanics, for good or ill, and that means the ground-breaking destructible environments and reactive car-damage from the original is all gone. Buildings only break when they're supposed to, and the cars themselves, just like Mafia II, will express damage in the exact same, pre-scripted way every single time, regardless of where and how they were hit. In the original, you could punch your vehicle, and see that specific part dent or break. In this one, you can click a pole with the driver-side fender, but your passenger side will always droop first. A really minor gripe? Absolutely. But I genuinely missed that.
The music - Some of the songs from the original soundtrack are conspicuously absent or really-underplayed in this edition, mostly because it doesn't change with the neighborhoods anymore. Not really a bad thing, and some, like the chinatown music, was probably overhauled for "modern audiences," but I miss the period-specific clarinet music that was all over the place in the OG.

Gripes aside, it's worth your money, even at full price. If you like gangster films, noir media, anything mob-related, or even if you just like GTA and Saints Row style running and gunning, this game is going to hold your attention.

You can climb up the leg of giants and cyclops to punch them directly in the nards, bully an NPC into giving you his work uniform, and randomly run into Rhea Ripley as you wander around. What's not to love?

Short version: It's very good, and definitely worth your time, albeit with a few big caveats.
Grab it on sale if you aren't sure, but definitely don't just dumpster it based off the negative reviews.

Long version: It's an odd game that has a lot flaws and issues, and yet... somehow... it manages to be almost ridiculously enjoyable. It's unique, gorgeous, fun, engaging and just likable in a way that makes you excuse the blemishes when it's working well. This franchise continues to have, hands down, the best combat system of any RPG. There's no endless routine of well-timed dodge-rolling. No simple M1+cheese wheel consumption. Both combat and movement around the map feel very natural and organic; you are able to fight and explore in ways that you daydream about doing in other major open-world RPGs, and the game rewards you for indulging yourself.
In this game, you CAN climb up that mountain or monster, and not just wonder about it.
Some of the best side-quests and dungeons are squirreled away in places you have to discover just by goofing around on your way from one main quest location to the next. The game forces you to learn and pay attention, but the learning is organic and engaging, vs punishing. When the game does become punishing, it offers escape hatches, whether it's finding pawns or oracles who know what to do with a quest you're stuck on, or just running away from monsters too powerful for you until you can find a group of traveling soldiers to hide with. As the pawns endlessly remind you, running away is a valid option. The graphics, design, armor, and scenery is all incredible. The character creator is probably one of the best in existence right now. People can and do create pawns that look like celebrities and characters from other IPs. It is a VERY good looking game. Which leads to the biggest and most valid criticism:
This is a resource-hungry game, and it is NOT well-optimized. You WILL need a beefy PC to keep framerates from dropping the game from stuttering. Even with a relatively recent video card, you'll probably still experience pop-ins and the occasional graphic glitch; a lot of issues you'd expect from a smaller studio, but not Capcom.
The second biggest criticism is just comparison to the first Dragon's Dogma, and it's true: There is SO much missed potential. It feels like a remake rather than a sequel, and merely transposes a lot of mechanics and elements from the first game without expanding or improving on them. Armor and apparel look a LOT better and have a lot of variety, but the number of equipment slots are reduced, which lowers the overall number of combinations. Enemy repetition isn't as bad as people say, but you will notice it. The pawns AI is dramatically improved in some ways, and deeply annoying in others. When the pawns work as intended, it's phenomenal. When they don't, it ranges from hilarious to frustrating. While some new monsters are added, some old favorites are noticeably missing, even if the bosses are better. The story is actually better than the first one, and the side-quests more intriguing (people forget just how thin the original game's main quest actually was), but it will feel like something is missing and you can't quite put your finger on it. People also gripe about the extremely constrained fast-travel, but it's both very intentional and it actually has more options than the original did. I, personally, think it's a big upgrade over the first one in a lot of ways, but it definitely feels like something that was lovingly crafted for a few years, and then rushed to completion in a few months, with a lot left on the cutting floor.

And, of course, the biggest criticism of all: CAPES ARE STILL CLIPPING THROUGH SHIELDS.
It's 2024.
WHY is this still a problem?

All that said... it's fun. Inexplicably so.
It's worth playing, and CAPCOM, if you're ever reading these reviews, it's worth still supporting. A Dark Arisen style DLC could go a LONG way to fix the gripes people have. Just sayin.

Look, I'm not saying it's perfect... but I WILL say that I had enough fun playing it in early access that even when a subsequent build would nuke my save and I'd have to start all over, I wasn't even salty.

It's a thinly-veiled analogue of European cultures, like Calradia always was, but now dialed back to the very early middle-ages, which is a time-frame games almost never explore, and featuring the Empire, or TaleWorld's stand-in for the Byzantines, which is something else you almost never see explored. Do you save the empire? Divide it? Conquer it? Spend 200+ hours hunting bandits just to melt down all their stuff and make swords, swords, and more swords? The choice is yours.

Mount & Blade has never been the top of the graphics game, but the dated look is worth the novel experience of playing something that feels like a blend of a generic map-based strategy game, realistic action RPG, and real-time battle commander. If you've ever played a total war game and thought "Gee, I wish I could actually stand in the battle line I've carefully drawn up," then congrats, you've found the game you're looking for.

Bizarrely addicting, rough around the edges, but endlessly re-playable, it's absolutely worth your time.... even the embarrassingly high number of hours below my username.