Recent reviews by Kenneth

The more and more I try to play Fallout 3, the more it makes me want to dip back into New Vegas. It's just insane. While the game looks virtually the same to NV, the differences in how both play are practically night and day. It's just a really rough experience in general.

My main complaints are:
• Mouse Control: There is just this weird sensitivity/smoothing issue with the game. It's hard to explain but aiming and menu navigation feels heavy and imprecise. The game is still ultimately playable, but you will have to put up this awkwardness in the controls. While this issue isn't the most abhorrent flaw in Fallout 3, it is the most immediately apparent issue thus why I had to list it as my first talking point.
• Character Movement: The player character just has this slipperiness with their movement, maybe it's Bethesda trying to include some sense of inertia to your movement but it really doesn't work. It just doesn't have that snappiness and responsiveness that I'm looking for.
• Durability: Guns and armor break at a rate that I feel is way too punishing. I'm not even playing on the highest difficulty, I'm just playing on the default setting, so I'm not wasting that many rounds or taking that much damage. My combat shotgun from 90% durability drops by what I feel like is 2-3% of my gun's total durability with every bullet shot, which is around 30-45 shots. Not even Dark Souls 1 pressed you this hard which is a ridiculous comparison. You may be wondering "isn't 30-45 shotgun shells like a lot of damage?" and, typically, you would be correct but this segways into my next gripe;
• Needlessly Tanky Enemies: Why did Bethesda think it was a good idea to make enemies that are more commonplace in the mid to end-game so insanely tough to kill? Raiders and the smaller monsters are fine since they only take 3 shotgun shots each to take out (which sounds fine when compared to other enemies but is nonetheless horrendous), but why do I need to dump an entire magazine for a low-level super mutant OR dump several mags if it was the high-level mutant overlord? Pair the tanky enemies with how fast stuff generally degrades, and the game just generally feels unfun to play.
• Terrible Skill and Perk System: While there are a total of 58 perks obtainable through leveling up in Fallout 3, a whopping 26 of them comprise of flat upgrades to either skills, resistances, carry weight, or VAT hit chances. There is incredibly little, if any, expression in a build because if you don't pick the stat bonuses, your only option is to go for these perks with bad or extremely niche conditional effects. It doesn't help that ~80% of the skills in this game lack any GOOD perks to make them worth investing into. Here's a rundown:
‎ ‎ ‎• Barter only gives you better selling/buying rates.
‎ ‎ • Big Guns? We don't talk about Big Guns
‎ ‎ • The only perk directly tied to leveling Energy Weapons only gives you +5% VATS hit chance.
‎ ‎ • The only Lockpick-related perk you get isn't until you level it up to 70, and you can't even get it if you don't have 7 in perception
‎ ‎ • Medicine is the first of the only 3 skills in this game that actually has semi-decent perks
‎ ‎ • Melee Weapons only gives you a perk that provides better crit rates on melees but it also needs you to invest 80 into sneak
‎ ‎ • The 'Jury Rigging' perk for the Repair skill doesn't exist in this game so you better be lucky with what weapons enemies bring or you won't be able to repair that unique weapon you like. This paired with the previous complaints of durability and enemy toughness makes it impossible to truly enjoy combat
‎ ‎ • Science is the second of the only 3 skills in this game with semi-decent perks
‎ ‎ • Small Guns is the third of the only 3 skills in this game with semi-decent perks
‎ ‎ • Speech doesn't even give you unique dialogue choices depending on the person/topic, it only increases your odds of a persuasion check succeeding. Speech checks aren't even a guarantee in this stupid game, so ignoring the Speech skill entirely in favor of save-scumming a conversation is always an option.
‎ ‎ • Unarmed is just god awful and I'm surprised they even included the skill in this game

A lack of meaningful character building and skill expression is the excrement-flavored cherry on top. You want to know why? Because Fallout 3 is. a. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. role. playing. game.

2/10

Game's so good that it's worth buying at full price

Hard to wrap my head around what to say or where I should even begin with Baldur's Gate 3, but at the very least I could describe it in 2 words: Flawed Masterpiece. The game just scratches that itch for me to be a perfectionist - get every good outcome (and hoard every single piece of cooking ware and chinaware in the sword coast). Out of all the roleplaying games I've played, they usually clock out at 60 hours for a 99% completion playthrough, but Baldur's Gate 3? A whopping 110 hours if you're not accounting for the save scumming. I hope that gives you a small nugget of the experience to come.

Probably the best thing about BG3 is its cast of characters. This is probably the only game for me that has compelled me to listen to every single piece of dialogue in its entirety. Aside from the weird mixing issues where performances might be softer for one line, and bass-boosted for another, all of it is spectacularly delivered. You can feel the quality of the performance that their voice actors brought to the table and it is just the chef's kiss. Every line has attitude and flair, and even the performances from voice actors they recycled for generic NPC's feel nuanced from their more major roles.

Combat is amazing as well. As someone who never even thought of tackling Dungeons and Dragons before. I'd say this is a very good primer for learning and getting into DnD (A friend also said it's pretty much 5e, whatever that means). Every class is amazing and unique. Not only that, but the developers don't try to bar you from abusing mechanics either. Want to perch yourself on top of a triple-stack of crates, preventing melee attacks from hitting you and giving you advantage on hit? Want to set up a conga line of explosive barrels that might clear out the entirety of the lower city? Do you want to kill every single thing with blunt force trauma by way of pushing chests off of ledges and onto targets? Baldur's Gate 3 allows that - and gives you the tools necessary to do it.

For the difficulty, it is very consistent, I've never found myself feeling truly overpowered or underpowered. You're only as underpowered as you are given how much exploration you've done up to that point. Otherwise, enemies scale up pretty well throughout the game, and the combat will constantly compel you to think well on your tactics.

And the co-op. Oh lord, the co-op. The experience is SOOOOO different when you have somebody else to play with you. The tone and story are completely different when you see somebody constantly messing around in the background and breaking out into song at every opportunity (It was me). I'm sorry Frosti for telling you to kick the squirrel when we were in the druid's grove. What I'm not sorry for, though, was beating Tiff with the squirrel's lifeless body because she deserved it (she did not).

Speaking of exploration - ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there is a lot of it. Want to explore every nook and cranny of a map to see if there's something good hidden away? Larian had you in mind when they decided to put in areas that an otherwise less intrepid explorer would have passed by or ignored entirely. Plus, if you do decide to explore, the game rewards you generously. By the end of the game, I had a mix of around ~250 pieces of armor and ~150 weapons that were either unique/semi-unique, used/unused, that varied in quality from uncommon all the way up to legendary. There's just so much to do and so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the backstreets and finding a random legendary?

Personally, I think the plot's pretty great. It seems straightforward at first but it does branch out pretty heavily, and it steadily builds up to a crescendo with a great plot twist that ties in all your progress and choices leading all the way to the finale. Your choices and actions also have causality and they do significantly affect who you befriend, recruit, or end up fighting. Each companion questline is compelling and Larian Studios really did a good job of fleshing out what would have otherwise been some pretty cliche'd, heroic-type characters.

I don't know how to score, well, musical scores but I think they're alright (I think). I do like the bum-bums, pling-plings, pring-prings, and the plunk-plunks of the musical doohickeys.

While Baldur's Gate 3 is amazing, there are some tiny quirks and bugs in the mix as well. Sometimes when your character is mid-jump they get snagged by something invisible in the air. That's all well and good if they only take damage and, you know, land on something, but sometimes they get snagged and just fall into the abyss. The game also doesn't allow you to look at places a floor-above your character's point of view. This really hampers some of the maneuvering, especially later on when there is a crap-ton of verticality to the maps. If they would just add a floor up/floor down button like in The Sims then that would pretty much be sorted out. These two issues were really the only ones I experienced personally, and that's kind of amazing to know a game in this day and age has such few problems coming into the final release.

A 9.5/10 game. I loved almost every single second of it.

A wise man once said during a match in Halo:
"Last one to die is gay"
"I'M GAYYY"

Amazing graphics, great ambiance and well-animated guns, but the forced PvP setting coupled with the small areas shared between the factions forces gunfights everywhere, even right outside your factions' safe zones.

The first zone is fine as it gives you ample distance from players of the opposing faction, but the zone right after that just really saps the fun out of the experience, made slightly less miserable if you partied-up with other players. Quests aren't even challenging as they're mostly fetch quests or quests that necessitate killing this amount of enemy A/B/C for their materials. The challenge comes solely from the probability of you getting killed without a chance to fight back going to or from the objective.

Oh yeah, and you drop everything but your weapons and armor when you die. Finally got that rare material you spent an hour to get? Well somebody just domed you with a sniper rifle, so you're dead without bleedout which prevents teammates (if you even have any) from reviving you. This type of gameplay does not in any way encourage going out and exploring the world, it encourages a sedentary playstyle of camping on an angle, waiting for players to pass by, shooting them dead and looting their corpses, and rinse and repeat, or to put it simply; playing like a rat.

I'd've been fine if I could HEAR footsteps if they were flanking me but the developers thought it fine to make footstep sounds as subtle as humanly possible, there's also no flash or any indication whatsoever for when an enemy's scoped in with a sniper rifle, so if you're in their crosshair - chances are you're dead or very dead.

TL;DR - Absolutely amazing realization of the stalker world in a voxel-based game, both visually and atmospherically, but is however marred by just a downright horrendous, forced PvP setting coupled with a small maps that almost guarantee you'll face players a minute of leaving safezones.

Probably one of the most realistic survival games out there. What Project Zomboid lacks in sheer graphical fidelity it makes up for in its unrivaled quality of gameplay. There's so much to do and there's always a risk-to-reward trade-off no matter how far in you are with a given character, whether you're just in your first hour or if you're already kitted-out and prepped for the grueling winter.

As the game's tagline "this is how you died" suggests, the game's learning curve is steep and you will often find yourself struggling to survive within the first few hours of every playthrough. Make no mistake, you will be seeing the main menu screen a lot with how many characters you'll be going through - but then you learn and adapt, and from those deaths and experiences you last just a little bit longer with each subsequent attempt. Just to prove a point, does any other survival game encourage you watch out for the food your character is eating? Calories, carbohydrates, protein, lipids and all? I don't think so.

To add onto that, when your character dies, it doesn't mean the end of that world, you can still make a character within that same save to try and salvage what your previous lives left behind, although it doesn't necessarily mean that the game gets more forgiving. As times goes on, the human environment decays and degrades, the food goes bad, the power and water gets shut off, and mother nature takes back its land. Over time you'll see houses starting to get overrun with plant life, both inside and out, which really gives you sense that there really isn't anybody else surviving in the world but you - and the people you're playing with if you're doing co-op. Did I mention there's co-op in Project Zomboid?

If you're looking for a more relaxed experience, Project Zomboid offers that too with customizable sandbox options and sandbox presets. Don't like dealing with the zombies? You can set the zombie population to 0 so that it's basically just you. Or maybe instead of dialing the difficulty down, you want the opposite of the spectrum? Set the zombie population to something like 5.0 and make all the zombies into sprinters with superhuman strength so that it's impossible to survive. Those are just a few of the many, many options you can fool around with. Part of the beauty of Project Zomboid is that you can make it however difficult or otherwise you want the experience to be, and the developers respect that right by giving you so many options to tinker with at the start of each world.

Not only that, but the mods - there's so many and a good majority of the releases are very high quality and fit right into the game world, and just like the base game, alot of these mods are customizable too with their own mod options to decide what goes and what doesn't go into your games.

A punishing yet rewarding and extensively customizable game, a great team of developers who constantly update you with future additions and changes, a dedicated community of players and thriving modding scene spanning multiple regions. Seriously, what's not to like? Maybe the perspective, but that's all I can really think of.

I wouldn't necessarily say Modern Warfare II is an upgrade to MW2019. It does a couple things right, and others horribly wrong.

For what it does do right is mainly the movement. The first thing that comes to mind when you think of MW2019 is the slide spamming - it's mostly gone. You can't cancel slides anymore, and the time it takes for you to be able to start shooting is noticeably longer. Not only that, you can't dropshot from sprinting either thanks to the reintroduction of the dolphin dive. Thanks to these changes, the movement isn't as abusable anymore.

Another change which I think is interesting is progress for camo unlocks. Back then, you had to level up every gun to unlock them, but now camos are tied to certain challenges for certain guns. When you complete the challenges, you unlock that camo for every other gun. It's a pretty neat concept that encourages, not forces, you to try out guns you wouldn't otherwise want to just to unlock the camo tied to it.

While I think the change to camo progression is neat, the way that Modern Warfare 2 changed up the weapon and attachment progression is very jarring and convoluted. Just as camos are tied to the progression of certain guns, so too are the attachments and the guns themselves. And while camos are optional and have no real gameplay advantage whatsoever; attachments do have a tangible effect on how well weapons play, so you're pretty much forced to level up other guns out of sheer necessity. For example, maybe you want to get the Monocle CT90 (That weird circular russian sight), to get that you have to: level up the Kastov 762 to level 10 which unlocks the Kastov 545, and then level that up to level 13 which unlocks the Kastov-74U, and then level that up to level 15 which unlocks you the Vaznev-9K, and you guessed it level that up too to level 14 which finally unlocks you the Minibak, and then finally level it up to level 12, and there you have it - the Monocle CT90. See what I mean by convoluted? It unnecessarily puts you through the ringer just to get specific attachments.

One last topic that I'd like to argue, and one that is a hot button issue in the community is the SBMM or Skill-Based Matchmaking. Now, playing against people of the same skill as me is great, it is challenging, it tests my skills, and keeps me on my toes. But what I don't like is playing like my life depended on it. every. single. game. It can really sap the fun out of the experience when I really just want to let loose, but I cant - because I can't very well enjoy the game or test out weird stuff when I'm being melted in half a second every 10-15 seconds from me spawning, now can I? Activision, just add separate playlists with and without SBMM.

If you're playing in Asian servers; don't. Otherwise, good luck playing against the sweatiest crackheads every single game.

I think it just barely does enough to warrant a 7/10. Thank you for listening to my TedTalk.

Tmodloader opens up alot of new gameplay possibilities through pretty extensively-made mods, some of which are comparable to expansion-level experiences. Everything apart from buying Terraria, so don't expect the developers to stay on top of problems 24/7 (Looking at you idiots in the discussions "calling out" Tmodloader devs for being lazy or leaving Tmodloader to die before it got updated for Terraria v.1.4).

Slime Rancher 2 brings a strong sense of familiarity while improving its variety and visuals. Definitely a must-buy for both newcomers and returning ranchers.

My main peeve, and ultimately why I just can't seem to get back into Destiny 2 after the launch of Shadowkeep, is that the power level system STILL makes no sense whatsoever to a newbie; no explanations as to why it starts at the 1000's.

You may be wondering why I am fixated on this or why this point would even matter. If you're asking the latter then you've obviously already had experience with destiny 2 so just shut the hell up. It's the equivalent of forcefully giving a newbie in an MMORPG a level 70 character when the level cap is 100 and expecting them to fully know what to do and what to unlock at that point in the game. There is no organic growth, players don't feel like their characters are getting better because there is no established metric or a due process through which they can compare them to and improve upon, it's all a jumble - a confused mess of gameplay mechanics which would have worked out - if Bungie didn't delete most of the legacy content to save up on space (though to be fair, the game upon its steam launch was sitting at around 250 gigabytes so I can't complain too much). This is a main point of contention to me and in this review because Destiny 2, at its core, is also a role-playing game. You're playing a character that's living through a story, controlling them and improving them - what's the point of all that when you're instantly at the level 20 cap with the branches unlocked? Nothing, that's what. There isn't a need to play catch-up when the developers just give it to you on a silver platter.

Also what is the point of purchasing past DLC's like forsaken and shadowkeep when you can't even get the previous content to work? I know we needed to reduce the file size for the game but why did Bungie completely phase them out with no hope of accessing them? Aren't we in the era where hard drives are more readily avaialble? Why can't they just allow us to tick a box on/off to enable content in exchange for less space on our hard drive? If you own them you should at least have some access to game modes and content outside of the exotics to their respective DLC's. Bungie really did inherit activision's propensity for pulling anti-consumer stunts like this for the sake of enhancing the FOMO.

At this point I am merely echoing my woes I have aired out through my Shadowkeep review; There is no proper progression system, there is only the battle pass with shallow and insultingly meager rewards for what is a slogfest of an experience. I'd also like to parallel Destiny 2 with Warframe, they're similar in that both games do little in teaching or directing you where to go, but at least Warframe introduced tutorials for some mechanics whereas in Destiny 2, you're simply just thrown into the thick of it with nary a hint and expected to know what to do. They could have had a tutorial section for it - in the form of the base campaign - but then Bungie made the moronic move of removing that too from the game, so they kind of just both themselves and you in the foot

But hey, YoU pLay dEsTiNy 2 FoR tHe RaIdS rIghT, gUyS? Not to play devil's advocate, but Destiny 2 just made alot more sense before its move to Steam. Right now, their mentality to managing the game just seems like the good old 1 step forward, 2 steps back approach to me.