Recent reviews by diablo

csgo is dead

The problem with Wolfenstein Youngblood is that as an FPS, it's very average, but as a Wolfenstein game it's woeful. Swapping BJ for his twin daughters was a mistake, they're like the worst possible version of Blascowicz, and there's 2 of them. It's not very often I feel objectively negative about a game, but it's just so disappointing given how good the previous games were. Devs made this game an insane grindfest requiring tens of hours of grinding in an already mediocre game to fully level and unlock weapons. I have barely any idea what the actual story is here and I don't care either. I only paid £4 for this in the sale and I'm still annoyed by how painfully average the whole thing is.

The Ancient Gods Part One is staggeringly difficult compared to the base game. I beat the game on Ultra-Nightmare on my first playthrough without too much difficulty, a few close calls but it was off the back of my Nightmare playthrough so I was pretty clued in on how to play. After a long hiatus from the game I came back to the first DLC and was beaten senseless for the most part. I did manage to clear it eventually but to me it felt that the fights were a lot longer and required a lot of quick-thinking to get the most out of your arsenal. I found spirits to be very uninspired and forcing me to be a target whilst using the microwave beam felt like an artificial way of increasing the difficulty. Other than that, this DLC is great. Art direction is once again simply astounding, they really commit to progressing the story and I thoroughly enjoy the way they're pushing the narrative. If you enjoyed the main game, you'll enjoy this, it's just more of the same, albeit a lot more challenging in my opinion.

Jedi Fallen Order is loosely a crossover between Star Wars and Dark Souls. I know the trope of "every game is a souls-like" is played out now, so to be more descriptive, JFO is a third person melee action adventure game set in the Star Wars universe. It features combat revolved around learning enemy attack patterns, rolling, dodging and parrying. For what it's worth, I think Respawn did a great job here. The world is respectful of Star Wars lore and expands upon it with an interesting story that'll take you to multiple planets chasing a Jedi masters plan following Order 66. The combat is rewarding for beginners to this style of combat, but it's definitely not perfect. Cal handles a little janky at times and veterans of more refined melee combat games will find this trying at times.

Visuals are great with planets all varying hugely in their look. The first time you go to a world and step off your ship is always a significant experience and you explore with a number of platforming techniques you acquire as the game progresses. I was impressed by the variety of movement options this game gives you to explore and opens up new pathways on planets for you to return too and explore.

Rough edges aside, I only had one real problem with JFO and that was the exploration. If you were to play this game start to finish on story mode (the easiest difficulty) as a story game alone, I think you'd thoroughly enjoy it. If you were to play to play on Jedi Master or Grand Master, with an aim to 100% this game, I don't think you'd think of it so fondly. Whilst this games combat does feel like it's supposed to be played on at LEAST normal, which is sort of the whole point of these games, the combat challenge, the lack of polish will frustrate. It can be unrewarding at times when the combat doesn't work as intended but far worse than that is the exploration.

I decided to go for 100% completion and it was one of the worst collect-athons I've had to do in a while. The map lacks intuition and some planets have areas that you visit in the story and if you don't remember exactly the way to get there you can spend a long time trying to figure out how to get back there. There are 256 collectables according to Google and it certainly felt like it. I picked up probably 180-200 on my initial playthrough but once I returned to clean up, those additional ~70 or so items took me hours to find, even with the use of guides. This is largely due to some things being incredibly hidden in what seems like plain sight retrospectively, but I didn't see in hours of casual play. Backtracking to some places also can take a very long time if you happen to miss anything on the first run through, and the lack of fast travel means you then have to hotfoot it all the way back to your ship in the opposite direction. I'm only noting this to let achievement hunters know what they're in for if they choose to pick this.

Jedi Fallen Order ticks a lot of boxes. It expands the Star Wars universe and creates a melee action adventure that will appeal greatly to beginners to the genre. With great fan service including original Star Wars characters and the ability to customise your lightsaber, it feels like Respawn manage to give the fans what they want. The lack of polish in places barely detracts from the experience to anyone unfamiliar with this style of game and would be enjoyed by any Star Wars fan looking for a challenge.

Devil May Cry 5 might just be the best entry in the series. A great game for beginners or veterans, this game is the perfect entry point for anyone new to Devil May Cry or people who have been playing for the last 20 years. A masterpiece of the action-adventure genre, DMC5 features 4 playable characters Dante, Nero, V and now with the special edition, Vergil. Every character functions differently and mastering them is a joy. A huge variety of weapons, abilities and upgrades will keep you constantly improving as you move up the difficulties. Visually this game is spectacular with beautifully crafted scenes, incredible ray-tracing lighting and high resolution, matched with blistering frame rates. Devil May Cry 5 is a triumph for Capcom, a ridiculously stylish game with boatloads of content for players of any skill.

Battle for Bikini Bottom is a fairly traditional collect-athon platformer. If you played the original you'll feel right at home here. It doesn't really push any boundaries and is definitely more geared towards fans of the show, featuring a lot of original characters. It features lots of neat little mechanics you use to progress through levels and will have you switching between characters to utilise all their abilities to fully complete levels. There is a great deal of diversity to locations and the soundtrack in each area mimics the feel of the levels accurately. Ultimately this game plays out well, if not a little generic. I'd recommend if you either like platformers or are/were a fan of the show. Anyone outside of that demographic I think would find this a little underwhelming as there's no real challenge. The only challenge is if you happen to fall to your death (or die, but that's far less likely), all enemies in the area will respawn and whilst they pose no challenge themselves, you'll have to slug through an area, often a large part of it, all over again if you didn't have a checkpoint. The same "reset" applies to some puzzles which can take a moderate amount of time to finish, so falling off a ledge at the last hurdle can be quite tedious.

I had originally started writing a much longer Steam review for Cyberpunk 2077, but due to the 8000 character limit, I didn't get even halfway through, so I will condense it into some finer points.

Cyberpunk has a few problems. The biggest to me is the lack of content that was promised by developers but never made it into the final game. It's well documented in the development process just how much didn't make the cut and was removed before release. I hope they will reintroduce some of these features in later updates. The AI is hugely problematic and really breaks immersion. Crowds of NPCs will crouch and cower when you commit a crime near them, all doing identical animations, police spawn in infinitely near you out of nowhere, but don't follow or chase you when you flee the scene, the AI is truly a mess. Much of the games content feels meaningless, life paths have no effect on what actually happens in the story and merely offers you a different prologue or some lines in conversation that, again, have no impact on the actual game. Loot has similar issues where for you find yourself wearing a skirt, power scouter and a bandana because they offer 10 points more armour than the kevlar vest you've been wearing for the last 3 hours. This applies to weapons too and makes the loot system largely redundant, as you're swapping out weapons for a tiny numerical increase. Lastly I wanted to touch on optimisation. Although I personally didn't have many issues with performance, I did experience bugs, but all of them were fixed with

Cyberpunk 2077 isn't all bad. I've seen lots of people complain about the RPG elements but I think these claims are baseless. The skill tree offers around 240 nodes for you to spec into, changing abilities or giving increases to different stats. A large number of choices in how you spec and the cybernetics will influence how all combat is handled. There are skill checks in Cyberpunk and whilst mostly they aren't influential to the game itself, your attributes are used in the world and dialogue too. Strength can be used to open doors or intimidate people, intelligence gives you more options in hacking, technical ability will allow you to deactivate cameras or pick locks. The visuals are absolutely stunning in this game, even in lower settings, the city looks amazing and feels amazing. The wonky AI can detract from the immersion as I previously said but judging the game solely on how it looks, it really feels triple A. The art design is right on the mark with a blend of eastern and western themes put on top of a city that really feels like a dystopian mega-city. The world-building feels truly handcrafted as little details are scattered throughout from the edges of the wastelands to the bustle of the inner city skyscrapers. The voice acting is also great throughout with main characters being well handled if not a little cliche in places, but I think it's fitting and just furthers the setting that they are in. The story feels compelling and seeing characters react to your plight, with the excellent voice acting, really cements the experience for me.

Side missions feature interesting characters, that feel easy to connect with and have interesting missions and stories. The gigs and scanner missions are more repetitive without as much narrative but as long as you don't leave them all to the very end like I did you won't mind them too much. The game has multiple endings, some of which can be influenced by your actions during the main game and whilst they are mostly somewhat depressing, they do tie off loose ends and feel weighty to the story.

This game suffered from people expecting the greatest video game of all time. It tries to do too much of everything and it suffers for it with everything being on a scale from just fine to excellent. What it does well, it does really well, what it doesn't do so well, requires further polish and additional content which CDPR do seem to want to work on and fix. All in all Cyberpunk is still a good game, the hype for this game was far too big for it's own good and between the devs over-promising and the higher ups forcing the game out before it's ready, it never stood a chance in the public eye. That doesn't absolve it of it's shortcomings but it does explain them.

Titanfall 2 was one of my favourite games I played in 2020.

Some of the best controls I've ever played, extremely responsive platforming and movement, incredible visuals, the list goes on and on. What makes Titanfall 2 really stand out to me is the story. A game like this could get away with just having great gameplay, but the story is immensely compelling, mainly due to the relationship forged between Jack and BT.

It's a damn shame we may never get to see a Titanfall 3, but at least we have this true masterpiece in the meantime. If you like FPS games, I couldn't think of a single reason for you not to play Titanfall 2.

Ghostrunner features some of the best first person platforming I've ever played. It's immensely satisfying to pull off and learning routes to deal with the various enemies, each of which pose a different threat level, will become more and more gratifying.

Each mission plays much like Hotline Miami, you will enter an area filled with enemies, that variety of which will force you to adapt to each scenario to prioritise or avoid certain enemies. Everything is subject to death in a single hit, whether that be a stray bullet or falling to your death, because of this, high tempo movement is key to navigating and efficiently killing enemies. You quickly respawn after every death and attempt to clear the same room. Once clearing a room/area, you will use the exceptional platforming mechanics, primarily made up of wall-running, grappling, sliding and a bullet-time like dodge to dodge environmental hazards and proceed to the next area.

Ghostrunner is a fantastic platforming experience with some impressive visuals and well thought-out combat too. Highly recommended for anyone that likes a challenging but rewarding experience.

DOOM Eternal feels like a sidestep to DOOM 2016.

The levels are phenomenal, every level feels very different and rather than it being "another Mars level" or "another UAC level", you really go through a lot of different locations, all of which are stellar, especially the Makyr world, my personal favourite. Most of the arenas you fight in feel fluid with a lot more use of high ground that the last game, as well as new platforming mechanics like wall-climbing and swinging from pipes to gain height. Once you acquire the rune for faster mantling (if you choose it), the platforming feels really good mid combat, fast and punchy.

Forcing you to use all of your equipment in tandem to constantly ensure your health, armor and ammo are full is extremely rewarding, as well as demanding. A lot of people were put off by this but if it's a function you don't like I'd just advise playing a lower difficulty, which there's certainly nothing wrong with. That being said, sometimes it feels like there is a little too much to remember to use. Flamethrower, grenade, ice bomb, chainsaw, blood punch, every gun, 2 weapon mods for each gun, melee (which is now useless), glory kill, crucible?! On higher difficulties, specifically nightmare and ultra-nightmare, sometimes it is extremely hard to manage all of these things.

They decided to march the story out front in this game, a little more front and centre, which I liked. Seeing the worlds reaction to the DOOM Slayer as well giving us more context for the events of the game really gave weight to what was happening, I felt personally invested in the Slayers quest to rip and tear. Of course the codex collectables generously scattered through levels also provide a great deal of story and are well worth reading. The story was like adding seasoning to a good steak in this game, it just served to amplify something that was already great.

Whilst I enjoyed the multiplayer in DOOM 2016, a lot of people didn't and they decided to revamp it to a 2v1 system instead. A single DOOM Slayer vs 2 player demons. The DOOM Slayer has his whole arsenal and the 2 player demons pick from a small set of demons, which then have different abilities, it's a "first to 3 rounds wins" setup, in which at the end of every round, both sides get to pick from a number of upgrades to either their abilities or stats to press on into the next round. At the moment, whilst fun, this mode feels very one sided normally. After playing about 80 matches, I won probably 70 of them with ease, but those that I lost, I lost hard. I'm not sure if it's a balance issue or not, but matchmaking does seem sort of hit and miss at the minute.

The biggest issue I had with DOOM Eterenal were the design choices in trying to be more faithful to the original DOOM games. Of course this is subjective, but one of the things I liked the most about DOOM 2016 was the visceral reality of it, well, as realistic as you can be in a game about demons from hell. The arcade-like ammo/health/armor pickups really threw me off the most, they felt very out of place. The demon designs were less of an issue for me, whilst I'd argue I liked the 2016 designs a tiny bit more, it'd be stupid to complain about, because the demons in Eternal look amazing still.

I would also warn buyers that the game isn't exceedingly long. I did a normal campaign run on nightmare getting 100%, an ultra-nightmare run for the gold armor (and bragging rights) and am now doing an "extra-life" run, after that, the battlemode will probably keep you entertained for a little while, maybe more if you have a friend to play as the demons with, like I did, but once you've done those things, that's kind of it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, in this day and age we've come to expect more of games, like 50+ hour campaigns with huge expansive worlds, but we end up with watered down games that whilst large in scale, aren't very densely packed with actual content.

This is one of the best games to come out in the last 10 years, fact. I would definitely argue in favour of it's £50 price tag, despite not having 100+ hours of content, especially if you enjoyed DOOM 2016. The only missteps I found were subjective, whereas the polish, fluidity and astounding look of this game are absolutely objective.