Recent reviews by Nocturnal

This game has a lot of promise, but as it stands I cannot recommend it. It has its fair share of rough gameplay, pathfinding issues, balancing issues etc. but the reason I ask you to stay away for now is just bugs! Here are a few from my first experience with the game:

• First off, minor gripes. The pathfinding is bad. Units get irrecoverably stuck quite often. Playing with AI teammates is not a good experience. They spend all the team's resources immediately and is utterly useless at defending you from the enemy. The pacing of the game is completely different based on your role on the team, but this ends up being a big problem considering you're all playing the same match. There are too many resource types and they are not properly explained anywhere.
  
  
• When you start the game for the first time you are required to accept the terms of service. Upon clicking the link to the ToS you will realize the developers already lost their Dwarfheim domain to scammers, so the ToS you are required to accept isn't actually publicly available - the game instead literally starts off by taking you to a phishing site! Not a great jumping off point.
  
  
• Then I played the tutorial which has you build up for a "troll attack", and when the time comes the game asks you if you want to complete the tutorial or play through the actual attack. I chose to play the attack but the trolls never came! What a disappointment
  
  
• Saved games are broken. Your mining supply lines will be deconstructed and unsalvagable upon reloading a save file. What a slap in the face
  
  
• The game crashes to desktop when I change the graphics settings
  
  
• The game crashes to desktop when I quit out of a game
  
  I can tell the developer put a lot of love into this game. It has some great art assets and the basic mechanics and controls are quite fluid. However, I do not think it is excusable to release a game this fundamentally broken. A strategy game where you can't save and reload? Losing your website to phishers within a few years? A domain only costs a few bucks a year like come on! I hope this game has a bright future, but I'm not holding my breath at this point

Have anyone ever played vanilla Arma? I couldn't even tell you what the vanilla experience *is*, besides booting up one of the single player missions and being sniped by an AI from across the map almost instantly. No, you play Arma for the mods, and while many standalone games have been made from ideas that originated in arma (PUBG, DAYZ), Arma still has an incredible depth that those games can't hope to emulate. It's janky at times, it's frustrating at times, but it's also some of the most fun you can have in a open-world shooter.

The gameplay is fun and very well executed, however I believe the game has some flaws:

1. The game is very short for the price
2. The story is predictable and not very engaging. I know it's a product of its age, but the forced app shutdowns and fourth wall stuff feels very contrived today. The dialogue cutscenes are also a bit tedious and unskippable.
3. The game froze a lot on loading screens for me. I managed to get through it fine anyway though.

If you get it on sale it is just as fun and rewarding as it looks. I just wish there was an option to play only the levels and strip out the story.

6.5/10

I didn't quite know what to expect when going into Nier:Automata. It wasn't a series I was familiar with, but I had noticed a large, ardent, and ever growing fandom - which enticed me to check it out.

NieR is a open-world, but still largely stage-based, tactical hack'n'slash game. It has some RPG elements, but I wouldn't necessarily brand it as such.

Some strong points are:
The character design. The characters have an iconic look and feel that they've really nailed. And beyond the visual aspect they have interesting, varied personalities and a certain depth. I also suspect this is a major reason for this game's success.
The music. The audio in this game is moody and really takes you in to the experience.
The combat. Fighting in NieR is incredibly satisfying. While not as deep as say, a FromSoft game, it certainly has some strategy to its button mashing. Enemies hit hard, and you are going to die a couple of times. I still feel the combat would be a whole lot better if the camera was just implemented a little better. At times, it can be hard to get a clear view of everything attacking you.
The Voice Acting Just as a disclaimer, I haven't checked out the Enligsh dub, but the original voices are both a very good fit to the characters and some great acting, especially on the protagonists' parts.

The story is an interesting point. I haven't yet completed the game, but from what I have seen the story is certainly deep and involved enough for you to get immersed, even if the whole "robots with emotions"-trope is a bit outplayed and predictable in the greater sense.

The world design is a little bit bland, being set mostly in a post-apocalyptic city. But as bleak as the setting might seem there are splashes of color and emotion here and there that keeps it fresh enough. While I don't get the urge to explore that a world design like Zelda: BotW provides, it still serves its purpose and doesn't depress you either in the way that Fallout's wasteland does.

Where I feel the game falls a little bit flat is in the RPG elements and menus. The progression system is hardly noticable and would better be left out, in my opinion. There is a modular upgrade system where you can customize your skills based on slots that you fill with different chips. I like that it ties diegetically into the games lore (that you are an android so it makes sense you're upgraded with chips). The menus are clunky however, and to assign chips you have to physically order them around. There are also levels in the game, but they don't serve much purpose other than to raise a number and increment your strength.

What I could really do without however, is how your inventory quickly fills to the brim with junk you pick up from enemies, which is mostly used to upgrade weapons which mostly play the same anyway. In my opinion, it would be just as well to let the weapons scale with character progression.

There is also quite a lot of humor in the game which you might or might not apprechiate. I find that most of the jokes don't really align with my sense of humor, but aren't close to being cringy either, so, tolerable, in a word.

Overall I think NieR is a solid AAA-style game with great, memorable characters and a satisfying combat system to boot - all tied together with a storyline and music that pulls you into the world of NieR.

A bit hard to get into at first, but incredibly addicting once you do.
I do think it should have launched with a few more maps, but other than that you get a lot of game for your money.

Pretty sure this is my most played new game of 2019.

Downwell is a fun, challenging game for those times you just want something to boot up and get right into during a short break. Great for that "hearthstone" time slot.

Don't Starve trogether is a brutal, hilarious and engaging co-operative experience.
You will die, and die again, so don't get too attached!

The hilarity of the difficulty is one of the things that makes this game so appealing. Like watching your friend die from heat exhaustion in the middle of summer while you and your friends are trying to help while not die yourselves simultaneously, or when you thought you were all set for winter when a giant suddenly smashes your camp to pieces. -At least you're in it together.

Unsure if Don't Starve (Single player) is for me, but this definitely is

Sadly, this game is seen as a product of its creator and not as what it is.
It might not be the best game ever, but it is a strong and important game that stands on its own two feet.

The game is relaxing and beautiful, if it gets a bit frustrating towards the end, but that is mainly a problem for completionists.

Overall a great game for fans of the genre (2D puzzle platformer). If nothing else, get it when it is on sale.

The Witness is good, but ONLY if you are genuinely interested in puzzles.
The visuals are stunning, but don't expect much story. The story IS solving the puzzles, and if you can accept that, it is a good game. [Minor Spoiler: ] So don't come to me crying if the ending left a lot to be desired.

Do not buy. I'm not joking around. The animations are atrocious, engine dysfunctional, completely unintuitive UI, ridicolously low framerates even at lowest settings. Buy Rust or 7 days to die, not this steaming piece of ♥♥♥♥.
To top the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with a speck of puke, the motion blur makes it lag even more and makes my head spin. Once I turned it off and my character didn't seem like he was on acid anymore I could at least walk around. But that's it. Walking simulator 2013. Think you can get over a 10cm ledge? Think again. The only good part of this game is that it allowed me to jump off a tall building to kill myself before I uninstalled it.