Recent reviews by Fenris

Pros:
- The building system is great fun. I quite enjoy making new buildings, reinventing/remodeling old ones, experimenting with the different pieces.
- Crafting is a blast. Making your own armor, weapons, and all the little sundry bits of decor you can make and add to your homestead to give it character.
- Cooperative survival gameplay is quite enjoyable. It's fun to work together to run dungeons, fight mini-bosses, hold the fort during purges, etc.
- They're still releasing updates and content to the game, giving players new things to play with.

Cons:
- The world feels so empty at times. Vast stretches of landscape where you go exploring and find... nothing. They even tell you to explore in the load screens, but the world of Conan feels abandoned in a lot of places.
- Lack of variety can make the game start to feel repetitive with time. If you feel bored from building and crafting, you're going to lose interest in the game fast because there's not much else.
- The in-game store can go anywhere from $2 to buy a new emote action that you're likely never going to use to $20 for a set of five items, of which you only want one. Sometimes there's a bargain --a new building set or a bunch of cool armor-- but there's so much stuff that feels vastly overpriced for the amount you're getting back.

This review is based on the Exiled Lands map. I have not yet experienced the Isle of Sipteh.

Took a fire truck to Muldraugh. My pal and I were clearing sections of road to make the drive to Louisville more manageable. I turned on the siren and stepped out of the vehicle, ready to kill a few zombos. Within seconds, the truck was surrounded. More zombos came out of the trees and buildings than either of us had ever seen in one place. They overwhelmed me instantly, tearing me to pieces while my friend looked on in horror.

When I came respawned, I ported to him, only to find my fire truck lost in a sea of zombos tearing the lights off the top of the truck. My pal lit a campfire and coaxed a steady stream of zombos through it in order to burn them down easily. The fire quickly spread back to the truck which also caught fire. As did my friend's SUV. As did the nearby forest. We watched in awe as the swarming mass of zombos burned in a non-stop blaze of death that slowly turned its eyes on us. I readied my double-barrel shotgun and fired at the mass, dropping zombos left and right, three to four at a time, but still they came. My friend beat them back with his trusty crowbar, and still they came. Every zombo was burning. We fought and ran and fought some more.

In the end, we stood in a road filled with ash and blood. The vehicles survived the encounter somehow. My friend rescued my backpack with all my stuff before my zombo-form was burned in a bonfire with all the rest that avoided complete incineration. Afterward, we packed out trucks and headed home, marveling at what we had witnessed.

That is why we play.

The mechanics are so simple and yet this game is amazingly deep and complex. You gt the hang of the card game and it throws something new at you. You get up from the table and explore the room and find new mechanics to benefit you or just throw a wrench in the AI's game. I made a 14/14 card that did damage in three directions at one point and was giddy with the idea of using it.

And just when you think you've beaten the game, it steps past the fourth wall and brings you somewhere completely new and starts again. And the whole time the card game just keeps coming at you and making you find new strategies and ways to battle.

It can be punishing at times, but just when you think you can't possibly beat an opponent, the solution presents itself. Maybe not on the first encounter, but if not then often on the next.

I don't know what else to say. This game is fun. And challenging. And it never seems to end. Even when you lose, your death becomes the catalyst for a new, more powerful card. I've played it for 13 hours and I don't know if I'm even close to the end yet. Not to mention that I picked one of four srybes to replace, which begs the question, what if I'd picked one of the other three? How different would where I am now be?

I originally wrote my review months back and while I gave it a thumbs up, I did tend to be a bit critical about things like lag, loading times, useless equipment, static models for some of the ghosts...

I think it's time to update this review. Since writing the original review, Phasmophobia has blossomed like a rose on a thorny vine. The developers have exploded with fixes, tweaks, improvements, and content. New maps. New spirits. New events, Cursed items that add a new degree of randomization to a night's festivities.

Gone are the static models floating about the house like mannequins. Gone are the useless bits of equipment. And gone with great relief are the long, drawn-out load times. You can hop into a map in seconds. You can be in the house, hunting for the ghost room with a friend in minutes. And there's so much more to come.

Phasmophobia is fun. You can play the same twelve maps on repeat and have a blast for hours with friends and family. At first, the fear of the hunt can be intense, but the more you play, the more it becomes a thing of excitement. Not something you DESIRE, mind you, but something not dreaded.

Every map has its own charm. From Tanglewood, the starter map, to Prison, the immense, dilapidated jailhouse full of squeaking cell doors and small office rooms, you'll find a map you enjoy playing and keep going back for more. Some ghosts can be a pain to solve. Some can be frightening with their aggression. But once you set foot in that building and all the sounds from outside vanish, you'll be ready to meet the specter and figure out what it is.

A number of friends and family have seen me play this game and bought their own copy just because of how much fun it clearly is. I look forward to the future patches with eager anticipation.

Hoo boy, what do I think of Sea of Thieves...

It could be a fantastic, fun game, except for one major flaw: you cannot option out of PvP.

In other words, everyone else in the game is completely within their right to attack you, sink your ship, steal your loot... I mean, what does one expect... it's a game about pirating right? But the game sells itself as a sea-faring, adventuring game where you fight skeletons and ghost ships, dig up treasure, follow clues... and for some like me, that's all we want to do. We don't want to have to worry that after we've spent three hours following maps and rhymes to find a chest of gold, that some other ship is going to come along and decide to sink us.

Mind you, there are supposedly "story missions" that there is supposedly an unspoken agreement among players that they do not engage each other when on one of these missions. And yet, there are some who gleefully act like Captain Barbossa, "the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules."

Griefers are plentiful. They will drive you off a server by hunting you down just to sink you again and again. So rarely will you meet anyone with a sense of courtesy or honor that when someone acts like they are, you will treat them with suspicion, just because you've been burned so often before.

They really need to allow players to opt out of the PVP aspect. If it limits what kind of adventures you can do, so be it. The adventuring is fun, and the game runs well and is beautiful. But after almost a dozen concurrent times playing with a solid crew, working together for fun and profit, only to be attacked and sunk by a bunch of foul-mouthed children and lose everything, I am not playing this game anymore.

Not since Minecraft have I had this much fun surviving the onslaught of monsters while building progressively fancier forts to protect myself and my stuff. While I hope that future updates will allow for fast travel with ores, I am content to use workarounds to deal with getting massive amounts of metals from one continent to another in order to build new bases in my hunt for zone bosses.

You can start a new world and just engross yourself in building, or you can strive to get stronger and be able to make more things. The game is thankfully gracious enough to not beat you down with constant assaults, though when they happen it can feel like a chore to drive off the invaders.

Raft is a fun, casual game of dredging ♥♥♥♥ out of the ocean and turning it into radio antennae, computers, furnaces, grills, and guns. You literally take palm fronds, stones, plastic garbage, and wood and build an ark of magnificence. Along the way, you will be relentless pursued by sharks, blowfish, bears, and other various animals. Discover islands, clean up the ocean, dig up ore with a giant metal hook, smelt it into ingots and make a single bolt out of them!

Have friends? Enjoy arguing as you fight over resources! Watch as quarrels break out over who used all the wood! Engage in bitter feuding after discovering nobody refilled the water purifier!

This is a quality stealth game. The levels are well designed, the gameplay is engaging, the characters are interesting (although there is a moment at the end where one of your side characters gets done in, and there should totally be the ability to save that person, considering the way it's set up). I do recommend this game.

The only big flaw it has is that there are secrets for you to discover along the way, collectibles like flowers and objects, and sometimes you reach a place where there seems to be two ways to go. One way leads to a secret, the other continues the chapter, and it's not immediately clear which way is which. Once you go in the direction that continues the story, the game locks you completely out of going back and collecting the collectible. The only way to get it is to start the entire chapter over. And sadly, there isn't a lot of replayability here. The puzzles and options aren't quite clever enough for you to want to go back and try them again. If things were designed to allow you multiple ways to solve things, that would make it fun to play over, but they don't. There is one route, and one route only. So once you hit one of those multiple routes, you either find the secret and then continue on your way toward the story, or you miss the secret, continue on with the story, and never go back and get it because what's the point?

It's worth a playthrough, but don't expect to be playing it over and over again. It's incredibly linear.

There is no GTA game quite like Vice City. San Andreas has more depth and functionality, and in the end more replay value, but Vice City is just so enamoring and engulfing, you don't want to leave. The music, the atmosphere, the people... the lights, the cars... the music. I wish Rockstar would release an updated version or a sequel.

I really wish they'd make a sequel to Ghost Master.

The gameplay can be flukey at times, and the differences between some of the spooks can be confusing. Spending limited points to upgrade and make your spooks unique, but never having enough to fill them all out can make you never want to spend anything. The game is over far too soon too.

But it's so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fun.