Recent reviews by Desalus

I recommend Return to Moria with one large caveat; you have to be willing to deal with a sizeable amount of jankiness in order to enjoy the game. At $25 the game is appropriately priced for what you get. It was a mostly enjoyable 30+ hour long playthrough, however there was one point at which I was so frustrated it almost made me quit the game. I played the beginning part of the game with two other players, but they quickly lost interest, so I played most of it solo with the difficulty turned down.

The Good:

+ The dwarven theme pervades the game, which is what really differentiates it from other survival games and makes it feel special.

+ The game has the typical resource gathering, base building, and equipment upgrading that will appeal to survival game fans.

+ It has a story, and while it wasn’t anything amazing, it was good enough to provide additional motivation to progress through the game.

The Bad:

- The combat feels very stiff and is full of jank. Given how combat is a large focus of the game, I’m surprised at how unpolished it feels.

- The mines are procedurally generated, which usually isn’t a problem, however it can lead to some truly terrible layouts. For me it was a huge chasm that could not be climbed out of, proceeded by a room full of poison mushrooms, and then an orc/goblin camp that could not be avoided. This layout almost made me quit the game after dying numerous times.

- Several aspects of the game feel poorly designed or are intentionally obscure. For example, weapons, armor, and enemies have ranks and not stats. If an enemy outranks your weapon, the weapon will do significantly less damage. Upon unlocking a new area in the game, all enemies will immediately outrank your weapons and armor, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to prepare because you have to mine new ores to unlock higher ranked equipment. There’s plenty of other questionable design choices as well, but this one was the worst.

- I often had problems trying to connect to a game hosted on Xbox. I don’t know if it was due to Xbox’s Quick Resume, or something else was causing the problem. We didn’t have any problems when I hosted the game instead.

Back in 2011, it was extremely rare for a Warhammer 40k game to actually be above average (which Space Marine was). However, playing this game thirteen years later, there is really nothing that makes it unique or stand out. Perhaps I would have recommended it on sale for $7.50 (which I bought it for years ago), but charging $40 for this game is ridiculous, and even after being discounted to $14, it's still too expensive. It's a linear third person shooter, where you do the nearly the same thing for a short 6.5 hours. If it was any longer I probably wouldn't have finished it.

Not the "Overwhelmingly Positive" experience that I was hoping for. The game was an all-right experience, but what ultimately lead me to not recommend it was game-stopping and save corrupting crashing that I experienced. Sunset Overdrive, Insomniac’s previous game, was a much more enjoyable game for me.

I completed the main storyline, the DLC, all the side-missions, and a sizeable amount of the side-content.

The Good
+The traversal system was the best part of the game. It really captures the feeling of what I imagine it would feel like to be Spider-Man, swinging from building to building at high speed.
+The storyline of the main game and DLC was good enough to keep me mildly interested.
+The voice-acting, animations, and cut-scenes were well done.
+Unlike the Batman games, the city actually feels alive. There’s lots of traffic, pedestrians walking around, and dynamic crime events.

The Bad
- Most of the side quests and side-content ranged from bad (chasing down an old man’s escaped pigeons), annoying (many of the science stations), to mediocre (the Tombstone missions).
-So much of the gameplay has Spider-Man facing off against wave after wave of minions. It’s fun at first but it gets really old after the umpteenth time of doing it.
-Many of the combat encounters were incredibly frustrating due to the high proportion of enemies that had ranged attacks. Often times it felt as if I had to dodge every-other second due to the number of enemies shooting at me.
-Players are forced into playing as Mary-Jane and Miles as they sneak around enemies. I didn’t play this game to play as normal people.
-Various technical issues, such as low-res textures showing up, second long freezing while traversing the city, and crashing.

The Ugly
---About a third of the way through the main storyline, the game started crashing every time I fast traveled or loaded, and as it crashed it corrupted the save. Good thing I had a back-up save otherwise I would have been screwed. I lost about two hours trying to troubleshoot before finding a solution (reverting to a beta patch) which allowed me to progress in the game.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, while overall a good game, is an odd sequel. It’s more of a remake than a sequel, and some of the original’s worst aspects were carried over while some of its best aspects were left behind. The game’s core gameplay, the combat and pawn system, are what really make this game enjoyable and unique. However, its story and many of its other role-playing gameplay mechanics are lacking when compared with other RPGs. If you enjoy action-oriented RPGs, or if you enjoyed the first game, you are likely to enjoy this game.


The Good

• The combat is by far one of the best combat systems in any game I’ve played. The combat feels visceral, with each swing feeling like it has weight behind it and really connecting with the enemy. Characters are knocked back or thrown about by powerful blows, rocks and debris fly around when monsters are attacking, and spells feel powerful but not overly flashy. Unique to Dragon’s Dogma, you can climb up large monsters and attack them where they are vulnerable.
  
• The pawn system is the most unique part of Dragon’s Dogma 2. You create your main character, who you control, and a main side character, called a pawn, that accompanies you the entire time. You then recruit two other player’s pawns to make a party of four. Other player’s pawns don’t level, so you need to recruit new pawns once your current ones are under leveled. Pawns, even your main pawn, will gain quest knowledge and knowledge about hidden items as they adventure with other players. They will in turn tell you where to go for a quest or where you can find a hidden item if you are nearby.
  
• The game has 10 different classes (vocations) and each of them play differently. You can switch into and out of the vocations with no penalty. Not all of them are equally powerful, but you should be able to find one that suits your playstyle. There is even a vocation that allows you to use the weapons and abilities of the other 9 vocations.
  
• It is one of the best-looking games I have played. There were many times I mistook an in-game cutscene for a pre-rendered one. If your system can handle it, make sure to turn on ray-tracing as the sunlight and shadows cast by your lantern add a lot to the game’s graphics.
  
• The game has the deepest appearance character customization systems I have come across. Nearly every aspect of your characters’ physical appearance is customizable, even their gait and posture. I spent nearly four hours just messing around with different settings when creating my main character and pawn.
  
• The quest giving system feels realistic. There are no markers on your map designating someone has a quest for you. Instead, people approach you to tell you they have a task for you. Or, if there is someone waiting to give you a quest, you will be approached by a different NPC telling you that this other NPC wants to speak with you.
  
• The world outside of the towns and cities feels lived in and alive. You will often find pawns walking the trails or come upon them in the middle of a battle with enemies. There are other four person groups wandering about and they will join in on fights you have with enemies. You will encounter ox-carts and traveling parties as they make their way to and from the towns.

The Bad

• Some aspects of this game are worse than the original. While the music in the first game was great, it’s forgettable in the second. The end-game is also time limited and may or may not be as good as the original’s depending on your preference. There is no Everfall, no Ur-Dragon, and no mega-dungeon like Bitterblack Isle.
  
• Exploration, while much better than the original game, still feels very limited. The world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is incredibly mountainous, rugged, and full of rivers and bodies of water. Your character, unfortunately, is not able to climb up rock walls or swim (water above waist level is deadly). For most of the game you will be traveling in valleys or gorges, feeling trapped between rock walls or water that is too deep. The developers created trails on the map and these basically show the only places where you can travel or explore near to. The open world looks large, but unfortunately it is quite limited due to a large portion of it being unreachable.
  
• The game feels too easy (unlike the original which could be very challenging). There were only a few times during the game when I truly felt challenged. Even at nighttime, which was very dangerous in the original game, it didn’t feel challenging. Some vocation’s abilities also make parts of the game super easy.
  
•  At times, the quest journal can be unclear as to what you need to do or who you need to speak to. There are also certain quests, where you complete a step and yet the step doesn’t change its description to reflect that you completed it. It can be quite confusing to think you completed a step, only to have the journal not reflect that you completed it. I had to reference online guides a few times to figure out what I was supposed to do.
  
• The main character is silent, having no spoken or written dialogue, which will always be a negative to me. In this game when an NPC asks your character a question, they will respond as if your character answered them (when they didn’t), or the screen will fade to black as your character supposedly answers the NPC’s question.
  
• The limited options for fast travel make traveling a chore. There are two means of fast travel, one of which can be interrupted mid-way to your destination and the other one is rare and expensive.  The developers added many monsters spawns to the game to make traveling interesting, but after a while it still gets really boring. In the third act of the game, it seems like the developers acknowledged that players will have tired of traveling, because they give players many more free opportunities for fast travel.
  
• Performance in the largest city can be quite terrible. Capcom has acknowledged the issue and is working on a fix, but the issue still persists. My frame rate would dip into the 40s and 50s while in this city.
  
• The story, while more understandable than the original game’s, is still underwhelming. The story largely forgets about the main dragon, who turns your character into a hero and who you are destined to battle. Instead, it focuses on your character’s effort to claim rulership over one of the kingdoms. For some reason this kingdom allows the dragon to select their rulers, and for no other reason than that, your character is the rightful ruler. Also bizarre, is at one point in the story, your character ends up assisting your enemies in furthering their goals. The pacing of the story is also odd, because the game is told in the three acts, however the game can end at the end of act two depending on what you decide to do. This means that the story’s partial conclusion comes unexpectedly in the second act.
  
• There are some missing or very shallow systems in the game. In a few of the game’s quests you are told that you need to be stealthy, however the game doesn’t have any stealth system. Also, upon committing a crime, there is no way to pay a fine for your crime to be forgiven. You must be attacked, arrested, and jailed for your crime to be forgiven. When you break out of jail, the guards don’t even care.
  
• The save system can be quite annoying. I understand its design probably has to do with the pawn system and preventing save scumming, but it feels limited. You can only have one character at a time, and you are given an auto-save slot and a save slot for when you sleep at an inn or your home. When you reach the end of the game, there is no loading up an old save; you must start over with a new game plus.

Black Mesa is an outstanding remake of the original Half-Life. It stays true to the original’s spirit and gameplay, while rounding out the rough edges of the original game.

The Good:
+Like the original, it’s a fun, linear first-person-shooter full of scripted events that make the world feel alive. The best parts of the original game are still here.
+Greatly improved graphics, textures, models, sound, music, and physics.
+The Xen chapters are beautiful and the gameplay in Xen has been improved a lot over the original game.

The Bad:
-Just like the original, there’s not much story and Gordon is a silent protagonist. Dialogue with other characters is few and far between.
-There’s so many locked doors and blocked exits, with typically a single path through the entire game.
-New to Black Mesa are the achievements, which are a mixed bag. A lot of them aren’t close to anything you would call an achievement.

The Ugly:
---There’s a game breaking bug involving a puzzle in Xen that still exists years after the game’s release. I didn’t realize I had triggered the bug until I spent more than twenty minutes trying to solve the puzzle to no avail. I gave up and went online to find the puzzle’s solution, only to discover the puzzle was bugged and I had to start it all over again. Good thing it autosaves before the puzzle!

Bethesda took eight years, nearly twice as long as their other games, to develop their worst single player RPG since 1998. The most egregious aspect of this game is that it is almost entirely missing one of the best features of their previous RPGs; the free-form exploration of a densely packed open-world environment. It’s ironic that in the game where the main character explicitly becomes a professional explorer, it has by far the worst exploration gameplay out of all of Bethesda’s open world RPGs. Besides that baffling omission, nearly all of Starfield’s gameplay systems are mediocre at best. Almost every aspect of this game has been done better in previous Bethesda games.