Recent reviews by Jean

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lightsabers

Refined core mechanics in a straightforward group survival-adventure game. Player goals and freedom intermix beautifully. Requires good deal of player agency but feels responsive effortless to play.
Could well become a genre standout with more mid and late game content.

Fast-paced, rewarding mechanical technique, precision and quick creativity, CS:GO is very fun game to win at. Combining this design direction with teamplay and having the teams contest each other for area control in size-limited but carefully designed maps is what makes the game Counter-Strike.

These design decisions result in the reasons that make this shooter worth playing over the others, as well as its biggest problems, which reach deep into the community.
The key to having a good time is to have the right teammates, and finding them in matchmaking is like spinning the wheel of fortune.

Action game of the year 2013. Now sharper and smoother on PC. The minimum requirements are a joke. In actuality, a much weaker PC runs the game just fine if you're willing to CUT some of the graphical settings, shadows and AF mainly.

If you like fast-paced, unforgiving and challenging but fair action that don't ask too many questions, then this is for you. The straight-forward approach and extremely satisfying combat akin to DMC3 and Ninja Gaiden is the meat of this game. The story and the characters have their entertaining quirks in the story and optional codec conversations, but the real meat of this game is the gameplay.

This is all action, no tedious padding, and while that's probably what makes the game shorter, it adds to replayability and it just feels like a particularly well CUT movie: parts that add nothing to the whole will be left to the floor of the cutting room.

This action RPG provides a unique setting with beautiful art direction. The game is about 60 hours long on the first playthrough and most of the overall time spent you're always learning a bit of something new, getting better at the game. There is a healthy variety of weapons, and all of them have very different feel and style of gameplay to them. Just all the different one handed swords offer enough variety to keep things interesting, with their different movesets, weights and attack combination capabilities. Some weapons are better in certain combat styles and certain situations, and other weapons at different ones. There's something for virtually everyone, especially since barely any weapon is underpowered, and pretty much anything halfway decent can carry you through the whole game.

The strongest point of the game is the core gameplay mechanics. The basic way of how checkpoints work is lifted from metroidvania games; the bonfires are safe points, you return to them when you die and your health as well as your main healing tool, Estus flask are filled. The way you progress in the game is from bonfire to bonfire, and although the penalty for dying is typically not big and can be even completely recovered, the dangers between the fires keep the player on their toes.

The combat is reminiscent of high-speed hack&slash games, but at a much slower pace with less focus on offense and more focus on avoiding damage through blocking and dodging. All combat actions drain stamina, but stamina quickly restores within seconds as long as you're not doing anything, not even holding your shield up. This might seem illogical, but it creates a dynamic where the player can't be just blocking at all the times and has to judge when exactly are they going to block an attack, or if it's a better idea to try to dodge - or even risk taking damage and attack instead.
The combat does have some notable design flaws though. The most obvious is how commanding your character works, as it is a queue of commands rather than immediate action that follows your control. Meaning, if you tap the attack button twice quickly, your character is going to attack twice and there's no way to prevent the second attack from happening, even before it starts. It might not seem bad at first, but when you notice a sudden attack, you simply have no way to bring up your shield in time, simply because your character has a very single-tracked mind. This can be overally dealth with, but it can cause some really awkward moments, especially since it doesn't apply to combat controls solely.

The second trouble with the combat is not very serious one, yet one that is always present. The AI of this game is simply terrible. It can put up a fight, but suffers from too high predictability and rather weird decision making, which sometimes leads to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ difficult moments, sometimes to the enemy providing absolutely no challenge or the worst, the enemies simply killing themselves. Flying enemies have some real trouble controlling their flight, and if there's pits to fall into around, they WILL try to land there, too.
The biggest oversight in the AI design is how it works in groups - or rather, how it doesn't. None of the AI enemies aknowledge another AI's existence in any way. And this can be troublesome for combat, as situations such as where you block one attack and prepare to attack yourself fails because another enemy attacks through the enemy you were first fighting against. I could go into more detail, but the end line is that singular enemies are too easy to fight against, and multiple enemies are too hard to stop. This is reflected in the gameplay design - fighting more than two enemies at a time is extremely rare because of how it would break the difficulty. And that's a shame, what little the game has of bigger fights, they are rather fun because of how intense they can get, despite the shortcomings mentioned previously.

The world of the game is rather big, and is completely seamless as you travel through it. This is no walking simulator, however, and the areas are more about having a lot of stuff in small space than big, empty areas. This is a good thing, as moving on foot doesn't get tedious and you can always get to a point in reasonable time.
The game is not linear, and pretty soon in the player gets some choices of where to head. This trend is continued to the end of the whole game. Unfortunately, this is not all for good, as this can cause some major pacing and difficulty curve problems. If you end up going into an area later than the developer intended, with much higher levels, the area isn't going to provide much challenge at all. A lot of the time you end up running across the map trying to figure out what area to do next, which the game gives virtually no tanglible explanations about, aside from "that place is dangerous" style stuff. One must be prepared to have a lot of patience for exploring just to get a grasp of the whole area. Or, you can use a guide to understand it if you don't have the patience.
Which brings us to one more problem: using any guides whatsoever is completely gamebreaking. This is a game which puts difficulty a bit too much behind "know" rather than "know-how", which is just plain evil from the developer. If the game is supposed to be hard, do not do it by trying to confuse player, do it by throwing tough challenges that stress the players flexibility at their skills, not ones that stress the players ability to guesstry different things. Should I fight this boss by locking onto it or not? Was I supposed to figure out that a dragon can be lured out of the way momentarily by shooting it with an arrow? The problem here isn't exactly lack of guidance, rather than lack of intuitive design. And this one thing is probably the biggest flaw in the whole game, how it doesn't really reward a skilled combanant but the guy who read the strategy guide through before even touching the game.

Overall, it is an unique game with interesting design choices and great core gameplay that is unfortunately dragged down by something that can only be described as lack of experience and understanding in intuitive game design. The difficulty that the combat provides is hardly frustrating, as your target is usually very clear, but going down the same ladder for the nth time because you either slipped off thanks to glitchy collision detection or simply because you have no idea of where to go. Lack of any kind of map could be considered hardcore, but having to memorize every tunnel, intersection and turn isn't very fun, even if you learn to deal with it with time.

7/10, I hope you have a good load of patience and focus. They can help you gain something rather rewarding in the end of it all.

mountain bleid on parsa