Recent reviews by Mephilis78

This game is great, obviously. It has 4 of the best Sonic games of all time, plus some quality of life features we never got as kids in the 90s. You have no idea how great it is to be able to actually retry the special stages. Especially in Sonic 3 and 2 for me, because I hate blue spheres. The easiest special stages imho of the games featured in Origins are the Sonic CD ones, only the last two are actually hard. The Sonic 2 ones are pretty easy too, it's just an issue of memorization... and I can't honestly imagine how any of us could ever memorize these things back in the day, since you couldn't retry any of them. You had one shot, and if you blew it you needed to find another special stage entrance.

Other features aren't so much needed as they are convenient. Sonic 1 for example allows you to use the spin dash and drop dash. Things that were introduced in later games. If you still want to do a purist run you can simply do duck rolls instead of spin dash. However, this begs the question. If you can use features from Sonic 2 and 3 in the first game... why didn't they add the Sonic CD peel out to the rest of the games?..... Also Amy Rose is fekking adorable and needs to be cherished.

This game is absolutely awesome. Best Sonic game since Sonic Adventure 2. I mean I have to hand it to Sega. They knocked it out of the park with two consecutive games in the last few years. Frontiers and then Shadow Generations. Man.... Things are looking up. I haven't been this excited for the franchise since the Dreamcast days!

Oh and the music is pretty awesome. Well, Sonic usually does have good music, even in the games that bombed.

Grift Theft Auto.

Play the SP campaign, forget about the stupid online game. Despite the single player being great, I can't recommend this to anyone. You see, everyone loves the single player story, and gives it positive reviews because of that, unfortunately Rockstar is illiterate and thinks you are giving good reviews to GTA Online. Trust me R* no one is doing that. You people literally abandoned RDRO to make more pointless updates to this multiplayer train wreck.

You know all of those soul sucking businesses you make fun of in the GTA 5 single player? All of those filthy vacuous losers who barely deserve to breathe oxygen? That's you R*. You are literally everything that you once hated. If your treatment of GTA Online is any indication of how GTA VI will be, I don't want anything to do with it. I'll just play Vice City instead. I don't need the baggage you guys bring these days.

You know what, Albert Einstein predicted that a game like this would exist. One that sucks so much not even light can escape. The quantum singularity of video games. A black hole. People play this for the sick pleasure of watching their very soul get ripped from their body and sucked into the event horizon. The fact that GTA Online still exists is proof that the world ended in 2012 and we are all living in some kind of purgatory.

I would absolutely recommend this game to others. It has issues, but at it's core it's a great survival game, and I would say it's even a good crafting game.

One thing I like about this game that other survival games don't do, is that it starts you out in a biome that nobody wants to be in, and so you have the goal of getting to the more comfortable, and temperate northern lands. In other games, the biome order is based on level... so like in Ark, you are starting in the most comfortable place,and for some reason, the goal for your character is to reach a frozen tundra? Right.

Over the years the weapons and armor have expanded a lot, and that's great because that's what was lacking when it originally released on Xbox (where I first bought it). That also gives it a leg up over the others in the genre as well.

One of my favorite mechanics in this game is that you can climb nearly anything. Which reminds me, I need to find a mod with Assassin's Creed armor lol

This game is in Early Access, and it's only been around since September. Keeping that firmly in mind, the game is impressive for being so young. The next thing to remember is that this publisher has ditched games before. I would like to counter signal that by saying, the other games weren't popular, and likely didn't make enough money for them to keep supporting them. This game, on the other hand, has a really big following thanks to YouTubers like ESO, Spiffing Brit and Sexy Biscuit. They've probably made enough sales to finish production, or at least to warrant continued updates for quite some time.

The graphics aren't groundbreaking or anything, but they are very pleasant. Some of the animations are a little stiff, and they lack voice actors at the moment. I do suspect all of that to change, eventually. There are plenty of quests, more than can be completed in a season, if you are trying to survive as well, and each season the quests are refreshed with all new ones. The only quests that stick around, as far as I know, are the Alwin and Uniegost quest lines. If there is a main story, it's those.

The survival elements are pretty good, I do think the temperature could be a little more harsh, or at least lower the base character's resistance to cold and hot. For example, there is a perk specifically for building resistance to the temperature, but you don't really need to use it. My character was literally "comfortable" all winter long with the same clothes he had on in the summer. The only time I got a "cold" warning was when I was deliberately hunting naked for almost a whole game day. Even then, it may have only appeared because it was night time.

The devs have a list of features that they are currently working on. By the end of 2020 they plan to have mounts, bandits and actual combat weapons. Any of these things would be a game changer. Getting around takes some time on foot, and the only hostile NPCs are wolves, bears and boars. I wouldn't call the wisent (buffalo) hostile, because they only attack if you get really close. The boars will attack if you get within 20ft while not in sneak. Some kind of weapon beyond spears and woodcutting axes would be great. That said, history shows at that spear is the master of all melee weapons, as it was the preferred weapons of warriors going back into pre-history, all the way up until about a short while ago.

I really look forward to seeing the game grow, and have enjoyed the growth I've already witnessed. This game has massive potential. Let's hope it's put to good use.

EDIT: Despite the relatively low amount of time Steam had recorded at the time of the review, I had an insane amount of hours on the Xbox, as well as Cryptic's stand alone launcher before I knew that the game was released on Steam.

Star Trek Online is basically the definition of a niche game. If you are a real Star Trek fan, or even a STD/STP fan, you might get some enjoyment out of this. Even then, not all Trekkies are into MMORPGs. I'm one of those people who greatly dislike WOW and all of it's clones (The only WOW clone I find tolerable is LOTRO). It's not a full on action rpg MMO like ESO or AOC, but it is close as it gets.


The strongest part of the gameplay is space combat. It is very intuitive, and easy to use once you get used to it. If you ever played the old Starfleet Command games then you will find space combat in STO to be very familiar.

Ground combat is a little more wonky, but not as wonky as a WOW clone. There are two control modes that you can use on the ground, RPG and Shooter. RPG mode works like most MMORPGs where you have to click on things to interact, and hold right mouse to turn camera, etc. Shooter mode changes the control scheme to where the camera is controlled by moving the mouse. It also makes your primary and secondary attacks bind to the two main mouse buttons by default. All of your other attacks can be used by assigning them to hotkeys (in both modes) or by clicking on them (RPG mode). You can also give commands to the rest of your away team. In RPG mode you can simply click on these commands. In shooter mode issuing commands to your crew is more like the whistling system in Ark Survival Evolved.

This may seem like a small issue to some people, but I was 100% thrilled to find out that you can assign a "walk" button. All that it does is make your character walk instead of run. Not appealing to everyone, but for people like me literally running through the offices at Earth Space Dock like a little kid is a little immersion breaking for me. We are grown adult Starfleet/KDF/New Romulus officers, after all.

Personally I love this game. It isn't the best MMO I've ever played, and there is a lot of hand holding. You have to reassign any custom keybinds for every character you create. The story is more like a theme park MMO than a true role playing game, but all of that is easy to over look if you love Star Trek. The Starfleet story line is the most developed one. The Romulan story line is probably the most interesting, and best written, of them all. The Klingon story is pretty good, but hasn't received much attention in a few years. The Dominion is the newest, and I haven't played through it, so I can tell you if it's good or not.

Ark is one of those games that I've had a love/hate relationship with. I originally played it on Xbox when it was in early access. The game itself is great, on any platform, but the hate part comes from the toxicity of the official servers. PVP is fun, and it truly is the only real way to play, but it also shouldn't be a chore and it quickly becomes that way on official server, no matter the platform. I ended up putting the game down for a couple years simply because of how toxic the Xbox servers were.

One thing I've always heard is, "if you don't want to get raided constantly then you need to play with some friends." That's always been an obstacle for me because none of my IRL friend's are into games like this. Although they all play Minecraft, I can never convince them to play any real survival games. Espescialy now, because they are all on a Fortnite kick, and I personally hate that game because it's a cartoon rip off of PUBG... as well as Survival of the Fittest. It's really too bad, because I truly believe that, at least one of them, would become hopelessly addictive if they gave it a chance. So I have to get over the hurdle of actually meeting people in this game, which is a severe task on any official servers.

All of that said, this game was fun from the very start. I may be biased because I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid. I also remember having very low expectations for this game when the first trailer came out because I had never played a truly good dinosaur game at that point in my life. Before this, the only decent dinosaur games were the first Dino Crisis, and the two JP Sega Genesis games.

I picked the game back up about two years ago, then I ended up losing my Xbox and my PC through some very unfortunate events. When I finally got a working PC again, earlier this year, I tried playing the Windows 10 version, and it was completely unplayable. If you tried to open the options menu from the start screen it would crash.... if you tried to change the display setting in-game, through the pause screen, then none changes would actually apply themselves. So the thing was locked in windowed mode, and my mouse would constantly exit the screen if I tried to look up or down. So online was impossible, and SP was a headache. So I had to put the game back down again....

So when the Corona stimulus came in, I allowed myself two games to buy (lots of other more important things took up the rest of it). I came to the conclusion that I HAD to get the Steam version of Ark, because I knew from Reddit that it didn't have the problems that the Microsoft version had, and my 3 year old absolutely loves watching me play this game. Ark was basically mandatory for me, just for the sake of having something fun to do with my kid. I definitely don't regret this purchase. This version runs flawlessly, and so far, I haven't come across very much toxicity in the servers.

As far as the details go, I can't talk about things the way I normally would in a game review, because everything is so adjustable. If you don't like the rate progression, change the XP. If you don't like the grind, change the harvest rates. Don't have enough time to tame things vanilla, change the tame rate... etcetera. I personally don't like going above 2x on anything (which makes finding unofficial servers a bit difficult), but to each his own. That makes game mechanics the only thing to really review, and they are all very streamlined and easy to get the hang of.

Overall, this was a big rambling story, and not much of a review, but the game is absolutely great. If it means anything to any of you, I bought Conan Exiles at the same time, and I have hardly touched it because I'm always busy with Ark.