Recent reviews by ZeroNight

Devil May Cry 6 looks a little different than I expected but I'll take it!

Also for anyone that really followed FF15's development, it's interesting not to see this said more commonly but I'm pretty sure the story in this game is a rework of FF15's original plot from what we've been told about it and what FF15 dataminers have been able to uncover. Just with a few names changed here and there and a more medieval setting instead of a more modern one.

So now we live in the best timeline - We got to enjoy FF15's original plot in this and FF15's newer plot.

Campaign is unplayable on a modern PC, it crashes after missions constantly and does not save your progress. Avoid like the plague if you want to play the campaign.

Glad it's on Steam instead of being forced to use the EGS. It's a fun game, ton to do, if you add up all the time I've put into the games making up this now massive collection of stuff it's probably well over 500 hours by now. Pretty much gets a recommendation from me by default at this point. This is a game with so much content in it now that you could probably play it exclusively for a year and still not run out of things to do. Highly recommend giving it a try, and it gives me hope that IOI will make a great James Bond game after this since it's already so close to being one already.

Warning: Always online game, and your save game is tied to their server for no real reason other than enforcing the rule of only trying elusive targets once. When the game eventually gets brought offline, unless there's a patch you *will* lose all of your progress. With how IOI has supported the game thus far, I would not say that's out of the realm of possibility for them to one day offer, and if not - modding can bring all the features to offline play, but it is still worth mentioning none the less.

I've never played the first two Baldur's Gate games, my only experience is with Divinity Original Sin. But even though these are two very different games, I'm absolutely loving this. Larian just keeps making hit after hit, at least right now it seems they can do no wrong. I have every intention of doing multiple playthroughs just to see more of what the game has to offer. My only wish is that I hope we get an iPad version for this too soon so I never have an excuse to stop playing.

Much more fun than you would expect given the pre-release trailers. Open world has some flaws, like it's a giant pain trying to just navigate somewhere when random boost pads lock your camera on a set path to try and get a collectible you already have way too many of, and it has the worst (hard mode exclusive) final boss of any Sonic game I've played, but overall I really enjoyed my time playing it.

Highly recommended to anyone that enjoyed the exploratory parts of Sonic Adventure 1. Aside from the final hard mode boss, bosses are great (if a little too heavily scripted at times, can sometimes be a bit on-rails) and the theme music to accompany them is the strongest the soundtrack has been in 20 years.

Not recommended to anyone looking for linear levels. They're few and far between and recycle the Sonic Generations assets for the 3rd game in a row. The only noteworthy thing about them is that some are pretty close recreations of classic 3D Sonic levels, like a near perfect Green Forest and Metal Harbor from SA2, but with it limited to recycled Generations assets the references might just go straight over your head at first glance since it'll visually look nothing alike.

It's fun. Just in case the demo didn't make that obvious enough.

I wanted to like this game so badly, and to start I did. It took a lot of inspiration from the Witcher 3 (both the good and the bad, the ingredient gathering gets old fast). And while I did enjoy the world, everything surrounding it could have used some more polish.

The combat isn't fully explained, found out about two hours in by accident that there's a roll feature with some invincibility, but the real bad part about the combat is the feeling that you're constantly exploiting it rather than taking part of it. You are invincible behind cover, full stop. Enemies cannot hit you but as long as your crosshair can see them, you can hit them. Your arrows come from the middle of the screen, not your character. So any combat encounter or boss is trivialized the moment you find any cover. And the game seems to encourage you to exploit it like that since it's brutally punishing, killing you in 2-3 solid hits that might pass before you blink if you're unlucky or on a boss encounter. The AI is also braindead, you can easily find the limits of where they won't pass and just camp them out, shooting a functionally unlimited supply of arrows in their general direction until they fall over.

And that's not the limit of where the bugs extend to. Near the end of the game, I've had more dialogue overlapping and canceling each other out than not. All of the reveals of the story were rendered an incomprehensible joke because I had unrepeatable dialogue constantly cutting itself off mid sentence and nobody got a word in. During these same final few missions, I fell through the world no less than six times, doors blinked in and out of existence, I died during a scripted sequence, lights and shadows flashed before my eyes as the world struggled to render, characters stood around braindead for 10 seconds before suddenly coming to life and starting cutscenes, all of it. I had a more stable experience playing Cyberpunk 2077.

With every passing moment, especially closer towards the end, I could feel my response to the game souring. And by the time things wrapped up, I went from thinking it was a decent start to a new series to just wanting it to be over with and not wanting to play it any longer. It's a shame, I really do think there was potential here and hopefully the sequel manages to fix a lot of these problems.

At least with keyboard+mouse controls, it doesn't really work. You feel like your ship has no momentum, no real ability to do any advanced maneuvers, etc. The game just holds your hand way too much, trying to keep you safe to the point where it gets you killed since your options get so limited. The weapons are also exclusively fixed forward, there's no gimbaled options so shooting with mouse becomes incredibly hard without making your ship wobble like crazy.

If you want a space sim, go play Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, you'll have a much better time. The only thing this game has going for it is the Star Wars theme and at least for me, that wasn't enough to get over how bad it felt to control.

I wish it was better, which pains me to say since I love so much about this game. The art, soundtrack, world, all of it is really fun! But as much as I love it, the gameplay isn't quite as good as the first one.

It's held back by questionable, conflicting choices that make me question what the target audience was for this game. It has a skill tree that locks off basic movement mechanics which makes it a pain for returning players, yet all of the side challenges the game has are so brutally hard that casual players won't stand a chance at completing them. It holds your hand and shows you exactly where to go at all times (unless you tone down how aggressive runner vision is) yet the combat encounters in the game will kill you over and over unless you make full use of movement around the environment at all times.

Visually, it's different than the first but equally beautiful. Also, you actually see normal civilians going about their lives which is always a nice change of pace.

The soundtrack is by Solar Fields again but not quite as strong as the first one, much more ambient. Which is fine, especially when you consider the soundtrack is nearly ten hours long.

As for the level design itself, going open world turned out to be a massive mistake for the game, at least with how it was done here. My only real complaint with it is that it doesn't really play like one, where instead of being able to go anywhere you want, you get pushed through gear-specific checkpoints like requiring a disruption glove or a grapple. It's an okay way to gate off the map so things seem fresh as the game goes on, but once you get past that progression beat, all it serves to do is force you down the same few paths regardless of what route you want to take, sometimes requiring long roundabout trips to get from A to B.

Oh and the story was clearly planned for a sequel that'll likely never come, so don't get your hopes up on that cliffhanger ending.

But still, as the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, I would rather have it than not. It just hurts to see all the potential of an idea like this not fully realized, knowing it could very well never happen. Hopefully in another few years, in 2025 or something, we'll see DICE give it a third try.

The best VR game to date, no contest.