Recent reviews by MikeFromNorthKorea

Off the Record is a fun game, but the PC port is atrocious. Let's count the ways.

- Frequent crashes, roughly once every hour or two.

- Controller support is busted. The game supposedly only supports Xbox 360 controllers and nothing else. But even my wired 360 controller wouldn't work. I had to use XOutput to get my 360 controller to emulate a 360 controller (Note: That is not a typo) before the game would recognize it. My friend's PS5 controller wouldn't work at all. Base DR2 also has this problem, use XOutput to fix it.

- Performance is abysmal. I'm on a GTX 1060 and it can't hold 60FPS. It can't even hold 30FPS. I get random and regular drops into the teens, with no rhyme or reason to it. Changing the graphics settings doesn't help at all. Even hacking the exe to disable DOF, Fog, etc. did nothing to fix it. My friend's on a 3000 card and even his machine can't hold 60FPS. Base DR2 does not have this problem.

- The interface for online co-op is significantly worse than in base DR2. In base DR2, you could easily join your friend's game in progress using the in-game menus. But in OTR, it's only possible to do this through the Steam overlay, which means you MUST have it enabled to play co-op. This is despite the fact that base DR2 came out on PC first.

- On top of that, online co-op is significantly buggier than base DR2 and breaks constantly. Lost connections, softlocks and outrageous loading times are standard. My friend and I can't play it for more than an hour or two without something going wrong and losing some progress.

- The final nail in the coffin is a massive bug in the game where a story cutscene will softlock your game in an infinite loading screen unless you disable multicore rendering. To disable multicore rendering, you have to edit an .ini file in your Documents folder. Doing this completely kills performance (moreso than normal), but you have to do this just to continue past this one cutscene, then go back to the .ini and enable it again. It's absolutely outrageous that this is required to simply complete the game, and that the bug was apparently never patched in 13 years.

Off the Record is a great game, but the PC port is a mess. The sad thing is, it might still be a better option than the recent console ports. But even then, I still wouldn't recommend this unless you know exactly what you're getting into with it. DR1 and Base DR2's PC ports are much, much better.

5 minute load times and silky smooth 14FPS at 1080p on a GTX1060. Thanks, EA!

But no really, the game is quite vile.