Recent reviews by Stolas

I really wanted to love this game. I wanted to believe that Bethesda could make a truly deep and meaningful Sci-Fi RPG. But what they released feels like a half baked shell of a game built on cobbled together pieces of their previous games.


There are a massive number of star systems, planets, and moons to explore in Starfield. The problem is there isn't anything in the them worth exploring. Land a few times on a few different planets and you will quickly see repeated building, ruins, and landmasses. These points of interest are populated with a total of 4 different human enemy types who all use basically the same weaponry. The only difference is their nameplates and armour. The notes inside a robotic facility on one side of the galaxy will be exactly the same as one on the other side. Its incredibly lazy just how little variation there is. Procedural generation can be done well but they just didn't make enough types of buildings/ruins for it to remain interesting for more then a few hours. I would have much preferred a fraction of the amount of worlds to explore, with more time put into making them interesting and varied. Compounding this issue is your lack of any transport around planets, there are no rovers or speeders to speak of. Additionally you cannot fly your ship in atmosphere. So planetary exploration has a lot of running literal miles between points of interest, while watching your stamina drain and refill. And when you want to travel to another part of a planet, to another planet, or to another system that's going to be a loading screen. There is no way to physically travel between places which makes the universe feel incredibly disconnected.

Side note: There are only 3 main settlements and a few smaller ones. Most of the smaller ones have very little in terms of NPC interactions and questing. So the game is also lacking in crafted content.


The outpost building system from Fallout 4 has been ported into Starfield and given a Sci-Fi coat of paint. But somehow the devs managed to make the system less rewarding and more tedious. In F4 you could store all your components in the workbench which, albeit unrealistic, was very convenient. In Starfield you have to construct 4 types of storage based on what material you want to store (solid, liquid, gas, manufactured components). The alternative is to just store your materials on your ship but that will require special investment as well as your ship has limited inventory space. The storage you can build in outposts is tiny, starting at 75 and going up to a maximum of 300 with extensive research and some perk investment. A couple welcome additions to this version of the system are resource extractors and automated manufacturing. These are fun to play around with. Unfortunately connecting outposts is unnecessarily complicated. Where in F4 you could assign one settler to connect two settlements which would then share an inventory, Starfield has you making individual cargo links between settlements, choosing which materials to send to and form. Combined with the fact that inter-system links require fuel input the who thing just ends up just being tedious. The system isn't rewarding either, where in F4 you were building off of interesting structures and feeling like you were rebuilding the wasteland, in Starfield you just build in mostly empty plains. No one will come and settle there. You can assign crew to work there to get certain bonuses based on their perks, but this doesn't even seem to work. For example I assigned a companion with outpost engineering to my first outpost. I assumed this would allow me to benefit from the perk without having to spend a point on it myself. It even highlighted the perk next to her name once she was assigned. But when I went to try and build the more advanced modules they just weren't available.


Its fine. Its just slightly improved Fallout 4 combat. Although I think melee weapons feel even worse to use then they did in F4.


Overall this is the games strongest section. There are 4 major side quest lines in addition to the main quest. They feature genuinely intriguing writing and I enjoyed playing them though a few times. I found myself actually interested in solving some of the mysteries and learning more during them. They are linear, with only one side quest line having you make a major choice during its final mission, but I find this only detracts slightly. One glaring issue I did have was the appearance of choice that was given to me at points. In one of the quest lines you are sent to arrest a number of people who will not come peacefully. You end up having to kill them. This isn't an issue. The issue is the game gives you non-lethal weapons that can incapacitate enemies, it even teaches you about them in another major side quest. Well on my second run when I decided to bring a non-lethal weapon once I incapacitated the culprit and his guards nothing happened. I had to pull out another gun and kill all of them, not just the main guy, I couldn't even let his guards live. This lack of player freedom when the game has presented an obvious solution to you is annoying as all hell and just not fun. Aside from the main quest lines there are a handful of one off side quests which vary in quality but are mostly good. There is however a bulk of "activities" as the quest journal calls them which are boring busy work. And of course its Bethesda so you have a smattering of infinitely repeatable radiant quests available to you as well. These are fine, but there is not real compelling reason to do them, the rewards in both XP and credits are basically nothing.

*Edited to fix formatting.

An excellent "time waster" or "busy work" type game. Slowly work off your millions of credits owed to the Lynx corporation by breaking down varied and interesting spaceships, piece by piece, component by component. The blue collar, sci-fi, cyberpunk, setting is established amazingly through the robotic corporate memos, the characterisation of your crew, and beautiful cut-scenes and graphics. This combined with the bluegrass, country style music reminder me of the (amazing) show Firefly. I personally went just expecting sandbox ship salvaging, but found a beautifully realised world with a story of working class oppression and resistance.

13/10 Would ♥♥♥♥ a porn star, alien, fairy, and the goddess Venus again.

Dishonored 2 takes everything from the original and cranks it to 11. Virtually every element is expanded upon. This time around you have two characters to choose from. Both with an expansive set of unlockable skills and powers. Takedown options are varied for lethal and non-lethal. In the original where your only options for a non-lethal takedown were sleep darts for your crossbow (which were rare and you could only carry five) and choking out hostiles. But now there is a host of new options which helps to mix up the gameplay. Stuff like stun mines, and crossbow bolts that make the enemy flee and forget what happened to them. I especially like the fact that you can now to a non-lethal drop take down. I also like that there are alway multiple different paths to take. You could take to high ground jumping from building to building. Or crawl around below in the storm drains and sewers. Or if you feel ballsy head on up the main street and blast or cut down any guard (or civilian) in your way. Aside from core gameplay, the story is good. There is always purpose to what you are doing and a there is a feeling of urgency present throughout. The game is good looking and runs well on my rig. I didn't discover many bugs. Mosty getting stuck in walls from time to time. Most likely my own fault for trying to blink (teleport) to places the devs would have never thought someone would try to get to.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a good FPS. Controls are fluid, gunplay is good, and a lot of the weapons make you feel like a complete badass. The setting was an interesting one. Instead of just fighting on the frontline of a war, you are fighting with the resistance picking apart the Nazi empire. The story is decent. Some interesting characters and a choice at the start of the game on which of your comrades to save. This choice will effect which one will fight on with you. It the kind of story you would expect from an FPS, not too deep, but good enough. One major annoyance is the in-between section. When your back at your home base between missions. Every time you are sent to find this or that. This section of the games serves little purpose and breaks up the action and combat. Without a quest marker, it can annoying running around looking for this and that. Overall a good game. The game took me about 8 hours from start to finish.

The first thing I have to say about this game is that I'm sad I didn't pick it up at launch. Its a tonne of fun sneaking your way around the dystopian city of Dunwall. Teleporting from rooftop to rooftop, slowing time and dropping on guards from above. For my first playthrough, I decided to go completely non-lethal. Not killing anything. This was a lot of fun and made the game challenging. But it did show the limits of the non-lethal takedown options. You basically have two choices for non-lethal takedowns. 1. Get behind them and choke em' out 2. Sleep Darts for your crossbow. You can also try just sneaking past undetected, using the magic to teleport and see through walls. Trying not to spoil too much of the story all I will say is there are multiple endings to the story based on the chaos level. The chaos level is determined by how many people you kill. So there will be different endings for lethal/non-lethal playthroughs. What really made me happy was the fact that there was always a non-lethal way to take down the main target. One I liked was kidnapping a lady and giving her to a stalker who was madly in love with her. Took me about 10 hours total start to finish.

To sum it all up;
Combat is fun, controls are fluent
Non-lethal is ok but lacks many takedown options
The story is good, made me care about some characters.
Some small bugs. Mostly getting stuck in walls

Pick it up considering its dirt cheap on sale at the time of writing this.

I have right around six hundred hours on this game and I don't regret spending one of them. This game is great when you have people to play with. If your going in solo its luck of the draw. Teamwork and coordination are vital in any play above Silver. Skill is prioritized, practice and you will get better. This is not a game you can just pick up and ♥♥♥♥ kids up like some 80s action film. Overall great shooter, but if your coming from Call of Duty or Battlefield beware, it may not be your cup or tea. But at the same time it might be. I came from those games and now happily enjoy CS and BF. Since my writing is so unstructured here a list of pros and cons as it were.

Pros
- Focus on teamwork and cooperation
- Skill Based, practice will make you better
- Good few gamemodes on both official and community servers
- Older game but holds up and still gets lots of support from devs and community
- Chance to make money, via skins, betting, or going pro

Cons
- Skins, valve makes a point to milk this game to the limit
- Cases, don't buy them. If your going to get skins buy them
- Solo que is AIDS
- Hard at first

Bought this game to play Altis Life. Got into a Altis Life server, farmed some weed, smoked some weed, got tazed by a cop named Bubba, got raped by a cop named Bubba, acted as target practice for a cop named Bubba.

10/10

DISCLAIMER: This review is the first impression from about an hour of play time. Contains spoilers!

The game runs well on my mid-tier PC and looks good. The landscapes are cool because of the magnitude of them. There are giant mountains and massive craters, makes you feel so small. Crafting is done well, with resources not too plentiful bu not hard to find either. Building the customizable habitat was fun and somewhat challenging. I enjoyed going out on expeditions for different resources and discovering different environments. At one point I found a giant crater full of magnesium. Entering the crater the ground started to rumble. Suddenly a giant f***ing sand worm flew out of the ground and nearly devoured me. Combat is enjoyable if a bit basic. You start with two basic weapons, the pistol and assault rifle. The pistol is weak but has infinite ammo, while the assault rifle allows you to lay down more heavy fire while your ammo holds up. On the downside, I did experience crashes sometimes during play, seemingly at random. Also, there seems to be some sort of lag when opening up the sub-menus in your inventory. I have only experienced this menu lag on the first time I opened the menus per session. Overall a fun title which I will hopefully have many more hours in.

10/10 Would play drunk again