Recent reviews by Elwonko

While not the worst DLC in the history of the Total War: Warhammer franchise, it's certainly the most expensive and the most underwhelming. The Chaos Dwarfs are fine as Warhammer races go, but not worth $25 - particularly when you factor in the major UI bugs, crashes, performance problems, and generally lazy oversights that come along with them.

Worse still, you can expect to live with these issues for months and months on end. Most of the new problems introduced in Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs will require a patch from Creative Assembly to fix, and their work on TW:W3 has been incredibly slow and shoddy so far. The way they're going as a company, we'll likely need to buy yet another new DLC to fix the problems they introduced in this DLC.

Dungeons 3 is the neediest, most insecure video game I have ever played.

From the unceasingly heavy-handed pop culture "humor", to the constantly yammering narration, to the in-game pop-ups begging me to leave a review or recommend it to my friends, everything about this game screams: "Am... am I good enough yet, daddy? PLEASE LOVE ME!"

Frankly, it's embarrassing. The constant references to the original Dungeon Keeper (and Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, and almost every other popular fantasy property of the last 40 years) just remind me that I could be spending my time playing one of those games instead.

It's a shame - the actual game play is decent enough, if a little short on content.

It definitely took a while for me to warm up to the Witcher 3 - the combat system has a weird pace to it, the camera can be a total pain, quest/monster levels seemed all over the place, and the horse riding controls like wet mush. Plus it feels a bit like they really, really want you to use a controller, rather than the glorious Keyboard/Mouse Master Race.

However, once I spent some time playing (and then re-mapping a few bindings and sensitivity levels based off what I was doing in combat), things got a LOT better. Combat in particular is actually nicely tactical and quite fun and rewarding, once you wrap your head around the underlying design mechanics.

It also helped that I can run it on full Ultra with all the bells and whistles and still get 100+ fps everywhere. It's pretty nice to have a graphically intensive game that is also very well-optimized to use the PC's full potential, rather than just total slop garbage code everywhere (I'm looking at you, XCOM 2, Total War, etc. etc.).

All the stuff about the great story, interesting and flawed characters, deep and immersive game world - they're all true. I can see why it swept up so many 2015 Game of the Year accolades - even if it isn't your personal favorite, it's definitely a great game once you get past the quirks and dig in.

Here's the thing about Fallout 4: it's pretty great, gameplay-wise, though the core story leaves a lot to be desired. Here's a few thoughts, and probably spoilers if you care about that:

The story is weak. It's the easily the weakest part of the game, and made worse by the decision to have the Sole Survivor voice-acted. I clocked in over 100+ hours in my playthrough, but didn't get around to the main storyline of finding Shaun until I was nearly level 50. Having my character sob and weep about "GIVE ME BACK MY SOOOONNNNNN" after wasting days and weeks in-game fiddling around with building my Settlers a cool bar with a lit-up pool table in the Castle seemed pretty disingenuous.

Plus, I could do without having ham-fisted moral quandaries shoved at me in a game where I'm running around as a merciless sniper that shoots the face off anybody that scans as hostile to me from 200+ yards away. Oh noes: when a synth can feel and love, is it as human as a human? Is it Good and Right to use any means necessary to free synths/wastelanders/etc.? NO ONE CARES, BETHESDA. If I wanted inane crap about morality and the Nature of Man, I'd play Metal Gear Solid 5 again. Shut up and get back to the shooting.

The game play is great, though - Bethesda really got the feel of shooting right, compared to Fallout 3, and you don't really need to use VATS unless you want to. In fact, there's a lot of build diversity in the game; you can go VATS-based melee, stealth sniper, crazy power armor heavy weapons, and on and on. Sure, some are stronger/more efficient than others (see again: sniping), but they're all basically viable on all difficulties. The heart of the game - exploring/fighting in the wastes of the Commonwealth in whatever way strikes your personal fancy - is really well done.

The graphics are pretty solid, especially given that this is a Bethesda game running on the aging, creaky Gamebryo engine. I can see why they stayed with it, though - the crazy modding scene around Skyrim will really extend the life of Fallout 4 once they fully support it. I'm also looking forward to seeing what proper modding tools can do to extend things like settlements.

Settlements are a massive time-suck and they're interesting as a sandbox, but they don't really tie into the core game very well. There's not a lot of reward/punishment for the Settlements; they don't really benefit you, outside of being a place to store your stuff and make +gooder armor/weapons. There's also no penalty for ignoring them entirely, outside of the few bits where you have to do them for key story quests.

For me, the best part of settlements is defending them from attack, but if you build a really good settlement you'll almost never get invaded by any significant force. My settlement at the Minuteman Castle was a masterpiece - an opulent fortress I spent a couple dozen hours tweaking so my settlers and Minutemen had everything their little virtua-hearts desired. It never, ever got attacked by anything at all. I didn't even get the scripted attack that I was supposed to get for completing Minuteman quests. Kind of a letdown, frankly.

I mentioned Metal Gear Solid 5 above, and Fallout 4 is a lot like it in many ways - they both have amazing open-world gameplay that's fun as hell; they're both marred slightly by awkward, clumsy stories that don't know when to shut up. They're both my favorite kind of game: the flawed masterpiece, where there's a ton of things that they do right, with just enough dumb stuff in them to make them fun to talk about when you're done.