Recent reviews by Silver

Sheltered 2 is a post-apocalyptic survival game similar in genre to Fallout Shelter, or This War of Mine. The idea is, a small group of survivors and a pet find an abandoned underground cellar and use it to survive for as long as possible in a post apocalyptic world dominated by gangs. The fun and reward in this game comes in you micromanaging a group of people's daily needs while transforming their small prepper-basement into a multi-level underground base with modern amenities and great furnishing over time.

So the game is about real time base building, turn-based combat and selective looting. It's pretty much a copy of Sheltered 1, except the 8-bit pixel style graphics have been replaced with 3D realism. The con side of this, is the game looks rather drab in its shades of red and brown compared to the more colorful & charming artstyle of Sheltered 1, and is also way more GPU demanding than its predecessor. Yet the graphics arent the focus of this game, but a TON of micromanagement (clicking around to repair things, set up expeditions, answer the radio and assign tasks to your survivors within the shelter), so you won’t be too focused on the graphics anyway. In fact I recommend to pause often.

Each survivor has a set of meters that keep filling up and need to be reduced: thirst, hunger, sleepiness, dirtiness, and the need to poo, initially into buckets that need to be washed out with plenty of water. Run out of water to flush the buckets out, and your survivors will pinch one out on the floor in desperation, raising their dirtiness bar immediately to max level. If a survivor then proceeds to go and eat while filthy, they will contract food poisoning and will find themselves retching all over the floor. So even if you have enough food, if you run out of water, your survivors will be reduced to a poo and puke stained mess within days, which is hilarious and sad at the same time.

This brings us to the most important resource in this game: water. Which is automatically collected every time it rains outside, into your water barrels via the water filter that sits on the surface of your shelter (and degrades over time and one of your survivors has to go outside and fix it every now and then, just like the oxygen filter - unlike Sheltered 1, without having to don hazmat suits every single time they are outside). However, if the rain is black rain, it first has to go through the water purifier you also start the game with, something that requires energy to run (so keep it off unless it starts filling up during black rain). What appliances use how much energy is checked at the fuse box, and if you have more power draw than power generation, things start malfunctioning. And the more power draw, the faster you'll run out of fuel. In Sheltered 2 there is also the weather vane, which tells you the forecast for the next day (or more, if you upgrade it).

So water is needed to slake the thirst of your survivors, to grow crops, to take a shower and flush the toilet, the latter two consuming less and less water depending on the quality of the shower or toilet you have built. MRE rations instead of water are now needed for the 2nd most important aspect of this game: sending your survivors out on scavenging missions.

People say devs abandoned the game, but only a few bugs in Sheltered 2 remain, like your dog not regenerating AP after its attack, or that radioing for traders to come to your shelter never works, but every so often one stops by anyway. So scavenging is the only way to accumulate resources & expand your shelter over time. Resources are stored either in boxes you need to build inside the shelter that take up room, or they get dumped on the junk pile outside from where items will occasionally be stolen by passers by.

Each scavenging party can consist of up to 4 survivors, and the dog if you have one. You have to create an exploration route (a loop that starts and ends at your base and formed by waypoint markers) for them to travel on, and they will visit any location that is on this loop. The bigger (further) the loop, the longer it takes.

Before leaving, you need to equip your party. Each has 1 weapon slot, 1 rucksack slot (to increase carry weight) and initially 2 equipment slots for body armor, camo, whistles to attract stray animals, or binoculars to increase the visible tiles when exploring the world map.

The sheer number of items that you encounter in the game world can quickly overwhelm new players. As you run out of inventory space while exploring, you need to start prioritizing which loot you bring back to the base and which things you leave behind. Thankfully, the devs have provided a “you have x of these back in your base” reference whenever you hover your mouse over a piece of loot you find at a location, so you have an easier time bringing back the stuff you desperately need, and leave the rest, usually heavier stuff, behind. Back in your shelter, you break down the items you brought back for their useful individual components, initially by hand, later by recycler.

The third most important aspect in this game is fuel. Which powers your generator, which in turn powers your base by not just keeping the lights on, but also the oxygen filter working. If you run out of fuel, O2 levels drop and it’s game over far sooner than if you run out of water. Thankfully, fuel isn’t too rare, because the fuel canisters you find in most locations (rather than just at gas stations like in Sheltered 1), last a lot longer than the water you find this way, and you can build an incinerator pretty early on as an alternate source of fuel where you can chuck anything you don’t need to keep the power going, but preferably coal and fertilizer. Unlike Sheltered 1, the generator cant be upgraded for better fuel efficiency.

This brings us to the long term goals of this game – fully exploring the world map, assembling vehicles and meeting all other factions and interacting with them (as i explain further below) but unlike Sheltered 1, Sheltered 2 has an even steeper initial learning curve that may make people ragequit. For instance, summer dries up all rain and your entire ecosystem breaks down without water which can after this point only be traded in the form of singular bottles from other factions (who offer it - not all of them do). Good luck washing yourself and flushing your business with the few bottles you bring back from a grueling 2 day march. And if you dont and just use it for drinking, good luck dealing with food poisoning every time you eat. Since crops wont grow without water, hunting rabbits and later deer become your only food source during summer. As a result, deaths and cannibalism can haunt your base, and you only lose the game if your main character (the base leader you began the game with) dies.

But since new recruits keep knocking at your shelter door every so often, any survivor you lose can be replaced without worrying too much about stat loss as the newcomers also level up over time. Loot at visited locations respawns (but slowly, so dont revisit the same place too soon), and while enemies get stronger over time, your survivors also earn exp from combat or trading & can even train in the base using punching bags or reading books to increase their stats (and unlock perks).

What is frustrating though, is the absolute lack of a combat tutorial. You learn over time though.

Sheltered 2 also tries to offer more story than Sheltered 1 by introducing faction mechanics (you can expand your control zone by storming outposts, OR - and this is more rewarding - do various quests for every faction for an eventual alliance with them, while in the 1st game you just encountered them as variously clothed enemies). And then there is the endgame, an extra bit of sci-fi thrown in. Nevertheless, the DLC of Sheltered 1 was more interesting.

So overall, I recommend Sheltered 1 over 2, but Sheltered 2 is addictive in its own way and took me 80 hours to finish

When I purchased this game, I was looking for a good graphics, slow-paced, singleplayer-focused, third person, zombie shooter with some RPG elements like inventory management and reading personal logs you pick up. And from the brief gameplay I saw on ytube etc., this game looked like it ticked off all these boxes. Now I was aware that it was an indie game, but I wasnt aware how bad it was. This game, is terrible.

To begin with, the writing. Bland and even with the occasional spelling mistake still not patched after all these years. Then, the voice acting. Almost everyone incl. the protagonist without talent, while the occasional sidekick you least expect it from, does a better job at delivery. And the lines of dialogue they have to say read like they were thought up by low budget russian game devs trying to imitate lines of prose taken from an 80s action novel. Then, the controls. Clunky as hell. From turning to interacting with the game world, especially that forearm mounted PDA of yours which is a chore to navigate in (there are four tabs, the first shows your inventory, the second your health, the third your map and the fourth your collected logs, and you cycle through each by pressing 1, 2, 3, or 4, and move within each by pressing the A and D keys and select something by pressing F). If they did that analogue feeling on purpose, cause it's 1998, well, hats off. Then the level design. Something also right out of 1998. Completely linear. So linear in fact, that the devs just block off any paths that branch off with debris, tossed furniture etc. and also keep your surroundings bathed in darkness to not bother with fleshing out the levels properly. Your character also cannot jump. And has to do a lot of backtracking since half the gameplay is about finding an item further in the level needed to unlock a door at the beginning of the level.

The gunplay is straight out of capcom’s resident evil games, which I am okay with since that is what this game was originally based on as a fanmade mod, before it was forcibly lawyered to become its own IP (hence the blandness). And finally, the unintuitive puzzle solving. Not even 15 minutes into the game and I had to alt-tab out and consult a walkthrough to figure out which lights to activate on the fusebox and which to leave off, especially since it has a lever that you also have to press after you're done messing around. Every quarter hour of gameplay you encounter another puzzle and they dont get any easier. Remember: your mouse is useless in this game other than for looking around, and navigation like selecting something on the screen can only be done with keyboard keys.

But it gets worse. A lot of the in-game logs/collectibles you pick up are mere codes that you have to manually type as passwords after looking up their respective entries on the game's website called hexacorebiogenetics dot com, just to be able to read their contents. Like...seriously? Couldnt you have just made them readable in-game? So, yet another reason to alt-tab out of the game. And finally, the inability to manually save your game, having to rely on autosaves instead, which happen whenever you cross an invisible progress barrier (to which you are at least alerted to by a floppy disk icon flashing three times).

And then there's the rather confusing story, revolving around a dysfunctional spec ops team called HADES consisting of the cold blooded killer and initial player character Liev, helicopter pilot Sandman, co-pilot Raven (who looks like an anorexic Johnny Sins) and another forgettable character in a gas mask called Crane. Plus two other agents, West and Crycek who however arent aboard the initial rescue chopper that is sent to a top secret research facility called AEGIS laboratories located on the northfall islands in Washington state to extract intact canisters of a pathogen called Castor-3 for the US govt. Which you find out, is a nerve agent the japanese had tried to infect the US with as revenge for the atom bombs but their submarine had run aground off the US west coast, but was later found by the DoD and then used as a research testbed. Castor-3 is the pathogen that turns people into zombies if there's a leak and they get exposed to it. In chapter 2, you play a completely different protagonist in a completely different setting.

But wait, it gets even worse. There is an extra mode tacked on to the game called HADES Dead End. These are basically time trials where you rack up a highscore depending on how fast you finish the objective. You get to choose from different soldier classes, these are basically differing starting inventories and weapon loadouts. With battle music constantly blaring and no checkpoints, not only does this game mode utterly ruin whatever bit of atmosphere Daymare 1998 generates in the form of slow exploration now being offset by frantic running, if you die, you also die and have to restart the entire level. And there's 4 such levels, basically copy pastes of the main game's levels, but with different objectives for you to do.

The only saving grace this game has, is that it runs on the Unreal 4 engine. So no matter how half behinded the development, the engine will try to make things look halfway decent with its shaders and lighting. The engine literally carries this game (as long as it's not daylight and you're in a forest - then the graphics look like they're from 2008). But is that enough to save the day? Nah.

Cause while the game does have some good moments after its below average start, like during chapter 3 where you explore the town of Keen Sight and get Raccoon City vibes after having spent chapter 2 in a claustrophobic hospital, the final boss fights in chapter 5 are so hard and repetitive that they make you scream at the screen. So skip this one.

I remember the year 2006 when I first heard of Elder Scrolls via the launch of Oblivion and it looked like no other game I had played before - it was THE best looking RPG back then and still a classic today. The fact that the game brought the medieval fantasy trope so vibrantly to life, paired with the fact that the game was so long, made me enjoy it for several years after that, and also because it was so moddable.

5 years later, this giant of a game got its sequel: S K Y R I M.

Hoo boy, the internet was abuzz for months after release, from arrow in the knee jokes to how life-ruiningly fun the game was, but when I first saw Skyrim's trailer I was a bit underwhelmed - the graphics, while definitely a big improvement over Oblivion, still didn’t look THAT much better. 2011 was already an age when games like Crysis 2, Killzone 2, Metro 2033, Battlefield 3 and the like were out. Thus, the long awaited Skyrim in its hues of grey somewhat disappointed me and I didn’t get it on day 1. Instead, I chose to wait for the Legendary Edition that included all 3 DLCs: Hearthfire, Dragonborn & Dawnguard.

When I finally started playing Skyrim I noticed that Bethesda had made a huge number of improvements (also with the experience from Fallout 3 & NV). Many of these inspired by popular mods for previously released Bethesda games. For example, the fact that NPCs now carry torches in the dark was something that wasn’t so in Oblivion, but the content of a very popular mod. Or Dungeons no longer having a silly door that you need to open to get in or out. You can place your books on bookshelves, towns are illuminated at night, you can hear your heart pounding when low on health and on top of all this, there is horse combat now!

Things like cooking, forging, smelting, tanning and sharpening have also been introduced - all you need is ore that can be smelted into ingots, which in turn are needed to create armor. Buying ingots and crafting your armor yourself is cheaper than buying it directly from the blacksmith. Of course, different armors need different types of ingots, like moonstone for Elvish & orichalcum for Orcish. Weapons & armor no longer degrade after fighting, and repair hammers are thus non-existent in Skyrim.

Magic underwent a HUGE improvement. You can now cast spells with your left hand or your right, or even simultaneously. Destruction battlemage? Grab your sword in your right hand and cast spells with your left as you charge in for the kill. Restoration battlemage? Strike blows with your right while you have your left hand ready to heal yourself. Defensive warlock? Grab your shield with your left hand to ward off enemies who get too close, while hurling spells with your right. Full-on spell caster? Hurl a torrent of spells at your enemy using both hands! Obviously your mana should be appropriately large for this kind of warfare. The fact that staffs are now one-handed instead of two is even more of a bonus for wizards as this allows them to cast spells using their mana while simultaneously casting spells from their staff that does not tap into their mana but uses up magical charge instead. And the utterly useless "touch" school of magic has been removed and the "on target" school of magic has been changed in that instead of hurling one spell after another at the foe, you now launch a steady stream of magic at them. There are also some pretty new improvements like the illumination spell now in the form of a glowing ball of light that floats above your head or sticks to any surface you hurl it at. Impressive!

But what I strongly dislike about Skyrim are its random enemy encounters. Bears & sabre cats jump at you from behind a pile of rocks, and it doesn’t take much playing to realize this wasn’t a nice effect of the immersive game world taking you by surprise, no, this was literally an enemy materializing out of thin air when your character gets into its scripted trigger zone. This is fun once or twice, but being unable to ride your horse for 5 minutes in one direction without being ambushed by such a creature spawn is just ANNOYING! At least in previous Bethesda games you could see enemies already existing in the game world (and thus avoid them) instead of them being created on the spot.

Now Skyrim is a cold place, but Bethesda has made sure that the game world isn’t as monotonous as a Cyrodiil player new to Skyrim might think - you'll still find plenty of green forests and almost Cyrodilic pastures in Skyrim (e.g. around Falkreath or Riften), while the hold stays true to its icy hallmark the further north you go - from the cold craglands of the Reach over the frozen coast of northern Skyrim to the volcanic lands of Eastmarch reminiscent of Yellowstone, there is variety. It gets even better when it comes to dungeons - the mainstay of every RPG. In Oblivion each dungeon had a different layout, but the majority of them were generic (mine, cave, ayleid ruin & fort). In Skyrim on the other hand, while dungeons can indeed be divided into these same 4 types (though it's nord crypt instead of ayleid ruin), each dungeon feels like it was hand crafted to have its own unique and distinctive charm - each has its own story to tell and it feels like its own mini-adventure when you embark on clearing out a dungeon in Skyrim. While there are several that are duds (just a large room inhabited by two bears you're done clearing within a minute), the Dwemer Ruins are nothing short of fantastic that sometimes need more than an hour to clear as you keep working your way ever downward and marvel at the great cities of the dwarves now inhabited by foul goblinlike Falmer - I've had more than one breathtaking Moria moment while doing these ruins!

While Cyrodiil had 9 distinct cities (one of which was destroyed), Skyrim only has 5 cities of such size. The other 4 are merely glorified villages, and even the largest city cant match the amount of hours you spent in the Imperial City. Perhaps to make up for this, Skyrim has gone overboard with quests. While Oblivion had 174 quests, Skyrim has 273. While a great deal of them are fetch-quests, i.e. an NPC asks you to retrieve an item for them from a ruin and bring it back for a reward - which can get tedious after a while (and these also get dumped in a new "Miscellaneous" section in your quest log) there still are enough themed and characterful quests to easily give Oblivion a run for its money.

And unlike the Fallout games (or even Oblivion) Skyrim's quests not only take you to almost every possible corner of the map, but also encourage a style of play where you can spend the first 100 hours without even bothering with the main quest. There's that much stuff to do - you never get bored. I can't speak of this kind of satisfying main-quest-avoidal in any previous Bethesda game, not even Oblivion.

Something I really love is the world map - it's no longer a piece of parchment, but an actual, interactive bird's eye view over 3D terrain, including weather effects like clouds and volumetric fog. The latter also tend to wrap around mountain peaks as well, making things look that much more realistic. While Skyrim may be a bit smaller than Cyrodiil, everything feels more natural - Cyrodiil felt like a game world, where dungeons were evenly spaced out and felt like they were deliberately placed there, instead of being hewn into the landmass and thus part of its physical geography. In Skyrim you dont need fancy mods like Oblivion's Unique Landscapes to find yourself navigating between beautiful rivers, rocks, forests and ravines. Everything feels like it has been shaped by the raw forces of nature rather than dragged and dropped in a game editor.

No previous TES title had its gameworld as beautifully designed. Once you play Skyrim, you are transported into this province and your real life self takes a significant toll as you spend so much time in this realm instead! Skyrim proves that it's not just MMOs that drain your real life away!

People, especially those just interested in single player, sometimes ask whether you should get Definitive Edition or HD edition from 2013. Or perhaps they already have the 2013 HD edition and ask why should they "repurchase" the game as a Definitive Edition.

To say that Age of Empires II Definitive Edition is the same game as Age of Empires II HD edition (that came out in 2013) just with some better graphics doesnt do it justice. Let's talk about the graphics first. If you have a good computer, you can download the HD textures pack which allows you to dynamically zoom in and out by rolling your mouse wheel and truly admire the detail of every single unit and every single building. Even back when I was a kid in the early 2000s, I actually loved playing Age of Empires II at 800x600 resolution than the standard of 1280x1024 5:4 aspect ratio back in the day, because the buildings looked bigger and more zoomed in, even if they got a bit blurrier. I never liked playing Aoe 2 on high resolutions because then, everything became tiny and you'd lose immersion. 2013's HD edition tied the resolution to your monitor's native res with no way of changing it internally in the game menu, so if you wanted a more zoomed in view, you'd have to manually change your desktop resolution before launching the game. Tedious. So Definitive edition's dynamic zoom capability is a big service to all those who appreciate detail. On top of that, you can zoom in quite far before the graphics get blurry, so there's plenty of new detail to admire. Sadly, the game doesn't allow you to play like this as there's a lot of stuff going on and in a real time RTS you have to manage your economy and react quickly to threats elsewhere.

Now let's talk about the 2nd reason why Definitive Edition is an improvement over HD edition. Not only has Definitive Edition revoiced every single campaign (granted, i preferred the old voices to the new ones) and reworked every single campaign slide artwork (for better or for worse, at least the new drawing style remains consistent throughout all campaigns while 2013's HD edition came with Microsoft's 1999 Age of Kings and 2000 The Conqueror's artstyles mixed with a crudely drawn new artstyle for the Forgotten empires, and then a more refined one for African kingdoms + Rise of the rajas) and on top of that, Definitive Edition has also voiced all the Forgotten empires campaigns that only had textslides in the HD edition, gives you 3 new campaigns (Kotyan Khan, Ivaylo, and Tamerlane), 1 new architecture style (steppe / central asian), and finally all paid DLC factions and architecture styles that were released later, are given free to the AI factions encountered in the base game's campaigns, so you also get to see new Bohemian and Polish architecture e.g. when you're fighting the eastern european factions in the Mongol campaign, even if you haven't purchased the DLC that would then allow you to play as or against them in random maps or play their faction specific campaigns.

So for me for example, replaying the Forgotten empires campaigns with narrated slides and in-game voiced dialogue was definitely a treat, although they removed the El Dorado campaign and replaced it with a new one called Pachacuti where you also play as the Incas but with completely different missions. And they also changed some missions that were heavily scripted and felt more like an RPG than an RTS scenario. So yes, the Forgotten campaigns did lose some of their complexity and uniqueness and got more streamlined, but are still fun to play.

The AI is also very good. The 2013 HD edition AI sucked; it built no walls but 20 towers and tried to swarm you with units and resigned the moment you destroyed its TC. It was so unfun to play against that I instead played with the 1999 Age of Kings CD A.I. but on hard difficulty. In Definitive Edition i play with the new AI on moderate and it feels engaging but not overwhelming.

And finally this is obviously the game with the most active multiplayer community, with all the new story driven DLCs from Dawn of the Dukes to Dynasties of India, new factions, new building sets, new units, and even Age of Empires I and Rise of Rome's factions have been ported over in a separate paid expansion pack game mode, so seriously, what are you waiting for?

People often ask: "should you buy State of Decay 1 or State of Decay 2?" To them I say, I absolutely loved the first game. When it came out way back in 2013, there was nothing like it. A story-based, open-world, single-player, zombie survival RPG with base building elements, permadeaths, and switchable characters that gave you the feeling of a community trying to survive rather than a single guy trying to rambo it with unkillable or quick-revive NPC companions. This was further enhanced by Assassin's Creed composer Jesper Kyd's chillingly good soundtrack, a captivating color palette that paired rosy pink sunrises with hues of orange daylight, and a story mode that never let you get comfortable for too long in one safehouse and would always give you missions - if you ignored them for too long, they'd fail. So you were torn between remaining at the base to focus on building and upgrading, and going out there and rescuing people while leaving your base behind to fend for itself, as sometimes it would get attacked and even survivors would die based on combat happening in your absence. Each character also looked unique with a distinctive combo of memorable faces and outfits.

State of Decay 2 allegedly claims to improve this experience in all aspects, but while doing so they just dropped the story altogether and basically made it a sandbox where you explore and upgrade your base at your own leisurely pace. Sounds good at first, but gets boring quickly. On top of that, the nights in this game are much darker compared to the dark green hue in the 1st game, here the pitch black nights just feel disorienting unless you turn the gamma all the way up. Also, whenever you switch characters, the new character says the same line of dialogue. Graphics are obviously better, but also much more demanding. If you wanna play this in 4k 60fps, you need a 3070ti or better.

Most annoying of all though, a new component is introduced in the form of "basic resource rucksacks" that you can grab - one resource rucksack at a time (with upto one follower tagging along, you can bring back 2 at a time on foot or store some additional ones in your car), which you periodically have to haul back to your base to increase its basic resource count by this resource, rinse and repeat (think age of empires 2 type of resources, except here they're food, meds, bullets, fuel and materials). Food depletes on a daily basis by an amount depending on how many survivors your base has, materials are needed to construct more workshops in the base; with meds you can cure infections, bullets allow you to make more ammo (but you can always find plenty out there and you generally don't use guns in this game since they attract so much attention and melee is silent and strong enough) so overall this game's fascination just boils down to finding out what your workshop upgrade tree looks like. And expanding your "zone of control" by clearing new locations and claiming them as your own by spending a resource called "influence" which recharges pretty fast anyway. Any additional "story" comes in the form of you having to arrange your own missions by contacting a radio operator. Sorta like "eyy, let me know where I can get this type of resource I currently need" or "hey you got any big zombie mob out there me and one friend of mine should head out and eliminate for influence?" Yeah...predictability is soo exciting, isn't it. All is not lost though, because there are "story missions" in the sense that neighbors in another part of the map will call for your help, steal stuff from you, or make you clear out a "plague heart" (think Halo's floodified captain keyes kinda blob that requires a lot of damage to destroy and attracts the mob while you're attempting to do so, but has boss loot). And eventually you'll learn the use of explosives to clear hordes. That's really all there is to it, though.

Even if we ignore the woke aspect of the game (almost everyone is various shades of brown, giving you the feeling this game takes place in the caribbean rather than in the appalachian heartlands) this game still just doesnt have the same soul and flair of the 1st game which also had a better looking interface (your stats and missions looked like they were hastily scribbled onto notebooks, just the way a survivor would). State of Decay 2's interface is far more sterile looking, and leaving aside its 20 minute tutorial mission and separately launched Heartland DLC, it feels like a shell of the 1st game, an empty husk with some expanded gameplay mechanics at the cost of a real story. My advice: get the 1st one and if you found it too short, then only get this one.

The Lords of the West is a DLC that adds two interesting new factions and 3 new campaigns, all featuring western european factions, but whose exploits take them to other parts of the world as well, from italy over the holy land to – for the first time in age of empires – the netherlands.

The Hautevilles campaign narrates the often overlooked and underappreciated history of Sicily, one of the most tolerant and prosperous kingdoms of europe where people of all faiths lived in harmony, while they were persecuting each other elsewhere. The story is told from the view of four lords from the Hauteville dynasty, descended from Norman explorers: Robert Guiscard, who makes a name for himself in southern italy, Roger de Hauteville who wrests sicily from the hands of several rivaling emirs, Bohemond who takes on emperor Alexios Komnenos’ Byzantines in Greece and later ventures further east into the Holy Land to Antioch, and Roger II who defends Sicily from relentless onslaughts from neighboring powers.

The Sicilians are the first of two new factions this DLC adds to the game. They are known for two unique units, one being a unique building known as the Donjon, which replaces their tower line, meaning it can already be built from the feudal age onward. It is more expensive than a tower, but cheaper than a castle, and can even train their unique unit, the Sergeant, starting from the feudal age as well. The sergeant is a mediocre infantry unit that however can build and repair donjons, and can be upgraded in the castle and imperial age to become a decent infantry unit in its own right. This makes the Sicilians less reliant on villagers compared to all other civs when it comes to expanding map control, as they can use their Sergeants to create and maintain forward outposts in the form of donjons, while castles and town centers built by villagers also take only half as long to build. More interesting mechanics come in the form of the First Crusade tech, which spawns 5 sergeants at every sicilian town center, so the more you build, the cheaper and bigger an army you can raise spontaneously once per game. Finally, being less vulnerable to counter units (e.g. archers to skirmishers, cavalry to spearmen & camels etc.) makes the Normans good in combat as well, only able to be bested by superior enemy units rather than by clever counters.

In the Longshanks campaign, narrated by Longshanks’ weak son (as we saw him in Braveheart) Edward II, we relive the life of his ruthlessly ambitious father, Edward I and get to play a campaign – for the first time ever – as the Britons (English). The campaign is varied and takes you from unifying England over reinforcing the crusader states, specifically the city of Acre against the attacks of sultan Baibars to building a series of castles across Wales and finally setting your sights north, to Scotland. A man who became known as the hammer of the scots, you take, as already referenced in the tutorial campaign, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, Dunbar, the Stone of Scone, and eventually capture William Wallace. The legendary trebuchet Warwolf also makes an appearance.

In the Grand Dukes campaign, you play as Burgundy, a now extinct nation that is vilified among the Aoe community for capturing Joan of Arc and delivering her to the English. During the campaign however, you get to hear the Burgundian side of the story, how France back then wasn’t one nation but three, with those who later become “the French” at the time in fact only being known as the Armagnac faction, and both English and Burgundians also having claims to the throne; how burgundian leader John the Fearless raced to capture Paris before the English did, but was assassinated by armagnacs, and whose son, Philip the Good, therefore swore revenge to the armagnacs and their peasant girl, Joan, but is initially preoccupied by Jacqueline of Hainault, who together with her husband, Humphrey of Lancaster, causes no end of troubles to the northern Burgundian holdings. Battles take him all the way north to Holland, where he participates in the Hook and Cod War and lays siege to the cities of Leiden, Utrecht and Rotterdam, eventually returning south to Compiegne to capture Joan.

The Burgundians are an aggressive faction that gets to upgrade their Knights to Cavaliers in the Castle Age already at a massive discount, along with other techs that arent available to other factions until Imperial Age, all their other technologies cost less food, their gunpowder units have an attack bonus, their farms can produce gold, and they can even transform all their villagers into improved Halberdiers called Flemish Militia, should the need arise. Their unique unit is the Coustillier, a mediocre knight that however has a powerful charge attack that recharges, thus making them useful at ambushing things like siege weapons on their way to your gates and castles.

Overall, I’d say this DLC is worth getting. Even though it doesn’t introduce any exotic new chapters of history like some of the eastern DLCs do, it provides further depth to some of the “enemy” factions encountered in the original Age of Kings campaigns as well as giving us insights into the history of Sicily and the Netherlands.

A sick mother, Claire Wilson, writes a letter to her daughter, Nicole, on her deathbed, which she then entrusts to the family lawyer, Mr. Jenkins, to only give to Nicole after her husband and Nicole's father, astrophysicist Leonard McGrath, has passed, by which time Claire is long gone. The letter informs Nicole that she has inherited the Timberline hotel that belonged to her parents and where she grew up in, but that Claire wants her to sell it after so many bad things had happened there that had made her take Nicole while she was still a teen and leave Leonard, never to return again. Bad things involving the affair he had had with a certain Rachel Foster that had ended with the girl throwing herself off a cliff. Claire wants Nicole to keep what's needed to pay off her college fees, and to donate the rest to Rachel's family. Now, ten years have passed. And Montana state law requires Nicole McGrath - now Wilson, the new property owner, to visit the property and make her rounds once before handing over the matters of sale to Mr. Jenkins. And so the game begins, in december 1993. With you, Nicole, reluctantly driving up a winding road in your car during a snowstorm to reach your inherited property in Lewis & Clark County near Helena, Montana. But as you are about to leave again, you get a call from a mysterious phone that had been placed in your former bedroom. There's a FEMA operator on the other end of the line calling himself Irving, urging you to stay at the hotel because the storm is worsening. Giving you more reason to explore the abandoned Hotel and find out the secrets it holds. Like what really happened all those years ago to Rachel. Sounds interesting, right?

Not really, and here's why. You CANNOT SAVE your progress in the game until "the day is over" and you go to sleep and the game autosaves for you. This means that you have to keep playing until you reach the end of each in-game day (chapter) and cannot progress in the game at your own pace. You lose the entire day's progress if you quit the game before a day is over. This is terrible game design. Especially since there is no dynamic day-night cycle or a clock that tells you when the game will save for you. Nah, in-game progress triggers the end of a day. And if you play the game for the first time, you obviously wont know how fast or slow you are progressing. Add to this the fact that you cant interact with most objects in the game (protagonist's personal thoughts when clicking on an object, like in most point-and-click exploration games) and instead only turn the objects around in silence while examining them means it's just not worth it. Especially since the game has lots of objects in each room and you feel compelled to spend some time looking around in the hotel, studying all the objects (in silence) and even if you enjoyed doing that, like i said, you cant save the game and continue exploring from where you left off. To make things worse, you have the walking speed of a turtle and the running speed of a granny. And ultimately, this game is just a walking simulator with your Firewatch style walkie takie sending you on a goose chase to interact with certain objects all over the hotel over the course of this relatively short (2.5 hour) game, which however will last longer because you often dont know what to do next as there isnt always an objective marked on your floor plan.

Furthermore, the engine does not support DSR/DLDSR downsampling, so if you have a 1080p monitor, you can only play in 1080p. And vsync kept turning off for me each time i started the game so i had to manually enable it each time to prevent screen tearing. Oh and one more thing: the game has depth of field and chromatic aberration effects that you cant turn off (there's barely any tweakable settings, just presets like low, medium, high and epic), so you will often find objects artificially blurred when trying to examine them closely.

And finally, the questionable morality aspect which some people have found extremely disturbing, in that the game isn't heavy handed at all in condemning predatory behavior and instead, tries to look for blame elsewhere. And fans of horror and jump scares will also be left disappointed. So this game has literally nothing to offer for anyone except some good-ish looking graphics. Overall, an utterly skippable experience.

Take Bioshock, remove all the nostalgic flair by changing the setting from 1959 (plus a few decades of disrepair) to a cold and clammy 2104, remove the weapons, put in more outdoor seabed sections, add more realistic marine weathering details on exterior hulls, and you’ve got yourself SOMA. A “hide, or run away from unkillable monsters” type of true horror game very much like Amnesia, Alien Isolation and Penumbra. But with an interesting existential sci-fi take. However, the game’s pacing is all over the place. The beginning is very confusing. You are Simon Jarett, a Torontonian who for the past few weeks has been recovering from a severe car accident that claimed the life of his girlfriend and left him brain damaged. You begin the game in his apartment, scheduled for a brain scan conducted by two scientists holed up with their equipment in a construction site, probably to avoid reporting to the government which would impede their pace of research. They are experimenting on a new type of diagnostic method wherein they build a 3D model of a person’s brain obtained by a scan, to then safely go ahead and run all kinds of treatment simulations on the computer model before settling for the best one and then only applying it on the real brain, thereby minimizing damage to the real organ. But right after the scan, you suddenly wake up somewhere else. In a derelict base. You don’t know if the two scientists (of who only one was present during your appointment) have pulled a prank on you or not but it is getting scarier by the minute and you have to find a way out. Back to Toronto. Well, good luck chasing that past life…

The first few hours of the game are scary, disorienting, and you quickly find yourself having to evade mechanical monsters without even an inkling of where you are and whats going on. Maybe that was part of intentional game design, to cast you headlong into the new sci-fi dystopia? After that though, exposition begins to take form as you come across computer logs and audio flashbacks you can “access” by standing near corpses to witness tidbits of conversation from their final hours (not because of any superpowers, but because people have blackbox chips implanted into them), and finally a friendly voice that you try to meet up with. The research base in the game is divided into separate sectors very much like Doom 3. You begin in a hub called Upsilon, responsible for geothermal energy that powers the base. The voice you hear over the intercom tells you she is holed up in Lambda, and you need to take a train to get there. Sound familiar? Bioshock 2 had this train system too.

A lot of the horror is lost and the mood suddenly changes when you come across machines that are… friendly. And disoriented. You feel sorry for them, because of who they think they still are. At least, you don’t feel so alone anymore like you did in the initial hour or two of gameplay.

As you explore more of the base you learn that it is part of an underwater research complex called Pathos II officially tasked with studying marine biology but secretly building a space gun that could launch stuff from the bottom of the ocean into space using some kind of accelerator tube, and you find out this complex housed some 60 or so researchers who ended up being the only ones to survive an apocalyptic comet strike that made earth's surface utterly uninhabitable. Like waay worse than Last of Us or Fallout type of uninhabitable. So with extinction imminent, what is the last words you would normally say to a friend? “See you on the other side.” What if waking up on the other side were a real possibility rather than wishful thinking? And considering resources will eventually run out even in a base deep in the ocean that survived the initial impact, and considering repopulating earth is out of the question due to the level of devastation and small gene pool of survivors, one of the scientists, Catherine Chun, had the bright idea to scan people's minds, insert the virtual copies into a solar powered vessel called the ark and shoot it into space using the space gun, where they would live out eternity in a virtual reality simulation.

While youre busy wrapping your head around this, more moral quandries arise around the concept of digitizing something. For instance, these days when moving data over, we know two ways of doing it: ctrl+c to copy or ctrl+x to cut. This dilemma also persists in 2104. With cutting implying the deletion of the data at its place of origin. If you know what I mean. Mark Sarang is the most famous example of someone who thinks this way. He believes the only guarantee of consciousness transferring over to the digital side, is by terminating the being that it was copied from, at the moment of copying. Otherwise all you would do is create a duplicate – a new you that isnt the real you. But if the real you ceases to exist at the moment of transfer, there would only be this one you left from this moment on, hence, the only real you left in the universe. He manages to convince Robin Bass and a few others of this continuity belief system, and they follow his example until the ARK program is put on hold to prevent further crew member suicides.

Over the course of the game, you end up having to face the consequences of not listening to Mark Sarang: duplication. The first one could be avoided because the original expired rather quickly and technology wasnt advanced enough to put the scan into use without many decades passing. The second time however, is when you have to make choices. The third time however...when there is no choice to be made...well...keeps you up at night thinking who is real.

I guess Futility is the game's main theme. Simon’s brain scan is futile – it doesn’t help him and he only lives on for 1 more month. Simon 2’s journey from Upsilon to Omicron is futile – with the DUNBAT gone & no other Haimatsu Power suit available, he never reaches the Ark in Tau & is left behind in Omicron. And Simon 3, while launching the ark into space, gets left behind in Phi. But was really everything futile? Simon 1’s brain scan allowed one sane entity to awaken in Pathos 2 and save Catherine 2. Catherine 1’s brain scan allowed Catherine 2 to stop Simon 2 from going insane & give his new life purpose, which was putting Simon 3 into the power suit. And Simon 3 launched the Ark into space, giving those in the sim hundreds, if not thousands more years.

Of course, whatever interest you pick up in the story is quickly drowned by having to evade monster, after monster, after monster. See those fancy terminals during midgame? Cant read what they say cause there's a monster patroling nearby and reading from a computer screen happens in real time so the game isnt frozen and those footsteps are getting louder... It really gets frustrating and annoying after a while. And desensitizes you to the horror genre because there's just so many of them. That's the horrid third quarter of the game. Where your new friend Catherine is once again in your pocket and you have nobody to talk to, just a "get to that part of the facility next" sort of vague general instruction but of course, you dont know where youre headed and the halls are increasingly darker and gorier. It gets so bad that I found myself looking up the Soma Walkthrough because I didnt know what to do next. Not talking about the puzzle parts in safe areas mind you, they are very easy, but sometimes things like having to update the security clearance on an ID card to access an elevator, or having to remove a high voltage safety panel to access the circuitry inside. Things that are hidden in plain sight. Near monsters. Ugh. And run (without the possibility of reaching a safe spot like holing up in a locker or something) like a headless chicken until you get whacked and have to limp to the nearest single-use healing mollusc, or hide among blood and corpses waiting for misshapen monsters to disgustingly shuffle past. Not my idea of fun.

One of the main criticisms leveled at this game was that it wasn’t like the previous two metro games. I mean, a metro game...that doesn’t take place in the metro. Well, it’s called Metro Exodus for a reason: an exodus out of the moscow metro. And look, I get it, a franchise should be about a certain thing and people who like that thing will keep buying games about it. But we already had two full fledged games set in the moscow metro with plenty of stations – go replay them if you want to return to that environment, but at some point, the story has to move on, preferably to somewhere new. And when you put yourself back in the year 2019 when this game released, the last good STALKER games we had had were already almost a decade old. And since both franchises are somewhat related, the dev team decided to take inspiration from the STALKER franchise and actually give us a good spiritual sequel to those games with voiced characters and jaw dropping graphics. And that is exactly what Metro Exodus delivers. Less moscow metro, more STALKER tundra, taiga and even desert exploration. So how exactly does that happen? You and a small group of pals get aboard a train which takes you from location to location, and each location has a different environment and is basically a miniature open world bubble. Explore it, resolve the quests therein, then catch your train to the next bubble. Pretty genius game design. For the 2000s.

One thing I didn’t like about Stalker Exodus, woops Metro Exodus, is that the game throws you right into the action with no slow buildup like in previous games which spend some time introducing you not just to the game mechanics but also to the setting, like waking up in the coziness of Exhibition station in Metro 2033 and walking your way through the lived in, zero privacy environment while admiring the graphics way back in 2010 when not even Crysis had created such realistic urban living spaces and had decided to focus on nature instead. And in Metro Last Light you do the same in Polis station. So in comparison to the previous two, I guess the third installment in the series really is meant to be played right after you finish Metro Last Light, have had enough of exploring underground tunnels, but like the lore and want to take the next step in the adventure. You start the game as veteran Artyom, returning from an outdoor trip exploring irradiated moscow and back into the canal system where you soon find yourself burning spiderwebs with your zippo and scrounging for ammunition before getting attacked by nosalis-like dog/bat creatures which are now called watchmen.

After making it back to the station in a wounded state and having to receive blood transfusions to get rid of the radiation, you wake up to a furious Anna who you are now married to, the daughter of ranger captain Miller who tells you not to keep returning to the surface and listening to the radio static because there really is nobody out there, but you refuse to listen and are soon out exploring again, and this time, spot a train belonging to the Hansa faction and board it, realizing there may be life outside the moscow metro and this is your one chance to escape the city, so you seize the opportunity.

Metro exodus offers a crafting system that uses two resources: parts and chemicals. You pick these up as you explore the map and can then spend them as resources to craft medkits, throwing knives, or molotovs, but also ammo for your weapons. Similarly, you have to periodically clean your weapons to reduce their risk of jamming.

Another aspect is weapon customization. Think Fallout 4, but you can’t craft attachments from raw materials and must instead find them. You start the game with two different weapons, an assault rifle and a pistol, and as you progress in the game and come across dead enemies, you can either switch your weapon for theirs, or remove the ammo in its magazine and any attachments it has. These attachments can then be applied to your weapons when you are at a workbench. Scopes, grips, tubing, these attachments usually make your weapon better, but not all the time. Sometimes, they decrease the damage but increase the rate of fire or silence the weapon.

Enemies have a low detection radius and therefore can be avoided, as ammunition remains scarce – only defend yourself when attacked, don’t try picking a fight with everyone. As you explore each free roam bubble, main quests and side quests take you to various corners of said bubble. You can check where you are on a map you carry with you and left clicking it turns it around and shows you the quest entries. Main quests however also have a narration when you load the game, so playing for too long will make you miss out on some of the narration.

Which brings me to another thing I didn’t like about this game: there is so much dialogue. Standing next to an NPC makes him chat with you almost constantly, and you don’t feel like moving away cause you may miss out on some of the lore related things he has to say, but you also don’t know when he’s done. And standing next to several characters will make all of them speak in turns and you quickly lose track of what they are saying. The mediocre voice actors and russian accents do their part in muddying the waters in terms of listening comprehension. And it also doesn’t help that the Metro universe has a rather complicated lore to start with.

In terms of graphics, this is a relatively demanding game. Turning on ray tracing and all the settings to max can cripple even an 80 class 30 series card at 4k. However, DLSS quality offers a massive framerate boost, almost twice as much as it does in cyberpunk, so playing at native is really not advisable. The original version of Metro Exodus which released in 2019 came with DLSS 1 which made the game blurry and was not worth the framerate boost, but the Enhanced Edition comes with DLSS 2 with varying settings and quality is almost identical to native so definitely go for it. That being said, at 4k, 8GB cards will still run into VRAM issues, so I recommend midrange 30 series cards stick to 1440p dlss quality for a smooth >60fps ray traced experience. Speaking of ray tracing, I feel bad for AMD card owners, cause there definitely is a bigger difference in terms of visuals in this game than in e.g. cyberpunk where it gets relentless praise even though it doesn’t do much except e.g. make the reflections of neon signs stay in puddles even when you are no longer looking at the sign. But in Metro Exodus, raytracing definitely changes the look of the game. On one hand, people complain that it makes the game less dark and perhaps takes away a bit from the feel of realism when you stay in the shadows. On the other hand, there are many instances where even Metro’s engine looks rather flat and cartoonish but ray tracing hides this with global illumination, bathing everything in more volumetric and diffuse sunlight.

So overall, I’d say this is definitely a triple A title and you should give it a go, especially if you played STALKER and wanted better graphics for it. If you prefer the underground tunnel exploration experience, then stick to the previous two titles in the franchise.

After Fallout 3 took us to D.C. and Fallout New Vegas to the California/Nevada/Arizona border area, each game with a great story and atmosphere of their own, the 3rd installment in the postapocalyptic universe had big shoes to fill. It begins by taking us to a new location, the Massachusetts Bay area around Boston known as the Commonwealth. On top of this, we have a brand new game engine. If there is a way to summarize the new engine, it is this: basking in golden sunlight. Because the shafts of Godrays poking through treetops, broken windows and illuminating interiors depending on the position of the sun are really what sell this game and make exploring so satisfying, as previous Fallout games suffered from dated engines even for late 2000s standards.

You also begin the game in pre-war 2077 in the quaint and idyllic suburban community called Sanctuary, being pestered by a Vault-Tec salesman asking you to sign up for a place in the nearby vault. Therefore unlike previous fallout games where exposition only came in the form of narrative slides, in Fallout 4 you actually witness the nuclear apocalypse as you and your spouse hurry along with other panicked people and get lowered to the vault just in time to escape the shockwave. Vault 111 turns out to be a cryo vault, and you are frozen in time as 2 centuries pass, but faults in the pods wake you and you witness your baby being kidnapped from the arms of your spouse, who is killed. You reawake some time later and vow revenge, stepping out as The Sole Survivor.

Gameplay is largely the same as in previous Fallout games, however I have noticed that the story takes a back seat in Fallout 4. There really arent many people to talk to and quests to be done until you reach the center of the map, Diamond City. So you spend the first 30 hours or so just aimlessly wandering around the outskirts of Boston, and only the new game engine with its godrays keep you from getting bored and putting the game away. The handcrafted locations in the game world also keep you occupied with plenty of variety – from the remains of your suburbs over quarries and radio towers to gas stations, drive-in movie theatres, water treatment plants, car factories, supermarkets, museums & breweries, each location feeling unique. But the towns you enter are mostly devoid of quest giving NPCs and only populated by raiders or feral ghouls (speaking of, these move a lot more dynamically now and throw themselves at you, trip and fall etc). Hell, it takes a while till you meet your first vendors: one is a family operating a farm, the other runs a diner and the third is a traveling merchant.

Radiation has been changed in such a way that it now directly affects your health bar. In previous Fallout games, radition was a separate meter that, if it increased to 1000 rads, would kill you and there were several tiers of radiation sickness that would make you weaker. But in Fallout 4, radiation acts as a maximum health reducer – the more irradiated you are, the lower your max health bar.

The giants from Skyrim make a return in Fallout 4 in the form of Behemoths – oversized supermutants. You can see them from afar, there is no need to get close to them, but if you do, prepare yourself for a very tough fight (unless you are in power armor). The loot isnt worth the effort, IMO, and they respawn in the exact location pretty quickly, so don’t bother with them. Speaking of Power Armor, these now need to be “stepped into” and consume batteries (fusion cores).

The Settlement and settler system is a major new addition to the game universe introduced by Fallout 4. The idea is, you come across a specific settlement either abandoned or housing enemies you get rid of, and then build a radio beacon using the workshop there to call and attract settlers to the settlement who you then have to assign tasks to, so that they can start producing resources for you. These resources come in the form of building water taps, gathering stations and planting crops. The settlement also needs to be able to defend itself, reflected by a defense rating that improves either by assigning certain settlers to raised lookout platforms like towers & barriers so that they become watchmen or by building automated defense turrets that require more sophisticated parts. If the defenses are lacking, your settlers will get attacked by raiders and happiness will drop. Your ability to fulfill settler needs (water, food, bedding & security ratings should be as high as the number of settlers) will raise the settlement’s happiness level, which in turn increases the efficiency of each resource producing station. You can then use the resources each settlement produces to build more structures there or take them with you for your own needs, like upgrading your armor or weapons during your travels.

This can be done in armor and weapon workbenches distributed throughout the Commonwealth, e.g. in sheds, garages or outside gas stations. Crafting (rather, upgrading) is a key element of Fallout 4 because unlike previous fallout games, each weapon is divided into several upgradable segments (receiver, grip, scope, etc.) and each segment has several upgrade options. These upgrades are called mods and can be disassembled from a weapon (replaced with another mod, if you don’t have any, you'll be required to craft the most basic mod to replace it with) and then assembled onto another weapon of the same name. Weapon mods can be disassembled from weapons looted from enemies, or from weapons purchased from vendors, and all the good ones assembled onto your own weapons, making them stronger (but heavier) over time. The stripped weapon can then be dropped, carried to the nearest vendor and sold, or broken down to yield back some components, where perks like Scrapper allow you to gain more components back. Alternately, you can construct weapon mods yourself, which however also require perks of their own & consume a ton of resources, mostly adhesive, followed by screws. These components can be bought from vendors, but usually at inflated prices. Buying them in bulk (shipments) doesn’t give you a discount, on the contrary – it costs even more, since it saves you the time needed to loot them one at a time from various locations.

So the best way to collect components is by scavenging “junk” items, i.e. items that are neither weapons, nor consumables, nor audio logs or notes, but are made up of several components. To view these, you need to select “component view” in the junk items screen in your pip boy to see how much of what you have. So while in games like Fallout 3 junk items were truly worthless junk you best left in the game world, the concept of crafting from junk introduced by Obsidian Entertainment in Fallout New Vegas inspired Bethesda to expand upon it and now make almost every junk item required in the crafting of some contraption. However, to prevent yourself from getting overencumbered, you need to prioritize which junk items you should take and which to leave. Generally, it is a good idea to leave behind junk items that weigh more than 1 lbs. During crafting, you will often be unable to craft a mod because of missing components. These can in turn be “tagged for search” by pressing T. What this means is that the next time you are looking at junk items in the game world, those that contain said component will have a small magnifying glass appear next to them, telling you this is the junk item you’ll be needing later. Once you have enough of said component you had been searching for, you can untag the component in the component view screen.

Finally, any item can be lifted by looking at it, keeping E pressed and then moving the mouse. The item can be rotated around its axis (and this also applies to any objects you pick in the workshop and want to place in the real world) by keeping the right mouse button pressed, and change the axis by pressing shift first and then keeping the right mouse button pressed.