Recent reviews by NubTheFatMan

I didn't even get to play this game. Couldn't get passed the main menu.

This SINGLEPLAYER game presents you with a privacy policy you can't decline before you even get to the main menu. This privacy policy says the game will collect all sorts of personal information from your computer that it has no right to collect.

Because I do not agree with this, I figured I'd just go into my firewall settings and block its network access.
However doing so now prevents the game from even getting to the menu. It loads the menu background but no buttons show up to let me start the game or go into settings or anything. Literally just the menu background. No error message either, it just does not load.

That effectively makes this singleplayer game an online only game.

I will not allow this spyware to operate on my system just because I want to play a damn video game. I wouldn't recommend anyone play this, ever.

I really wanted to like this game. I wanted it to be my game of the year. But it fell short of the expectations I had in mind from the trailers.

One of my biggest complaints is the lack of immersion. I spend just as much time in a menu as I do in a game. This is essentially a fast travel simulator. Sure you can go the slow way and go back to your ship and go to space and try to fly in an immersive way. But there's so many loading screens and cutscenes involved that I found myself just opening up the starmap and warping wherever I need to be whenever possible.

There is no space travel in this game. Space flight literally just exists for combat.

The main Constellation story was also the only interesting story for me. The faction's missions were just too short and hardly entertaining.
- I did Ryujin Industries' stealth missions first when I had low stealth skills. It was a miserable time because stealth awful in this game. It also never makes clear that you need to open your inventory and unequip your spacesuit and helmet for stealth to be more effective. But I still found it incredibly easy to get spotted, even with a chameleon ability.
- I did not like how the Crimson Fleet always spoke down to me and gave me passive aggressive threats. Small things but after hearing the same threat for the hundredth time, I started blasting away any Fleet members I came across, not caring about the bounty it gave me.
- The Freestar Rangers were meh. Could have been more interesting if you took on more than just one case.
- I never got around to the UC Vanguard. I just assumed it wouldn't be any better than the previous factions you can be a part of.

Despite having hundreds of star systems you can visit, and thousands of planets and moons you can land on and explore, this world feels so much more dull than previous games. I could get lost in the worlds of Skyrim and Fallout and wander from location to location and do in-depth exploration where I could, soaking up everything I could. I couldn't care less about this game's world. Traveling from location to location is just boring and seeing the same building I've already explored but in a new location thanks to procedural generation just makes it unrewarding.

The economy is very out of wack. Maybe it's for balance. But when I see something valued at 40,000 credits, but then it only sells for 2,000-4,000 credits, I'm left disappointed. Vendors also only ever hold 5,000-10,000 credits, meaning you can only sell a handful of items at a time. I collected high value guns to sell for money. I had like 1,000 cargo capacity consumed on my starship just full of guns waiting to be sold.

The lack of being able to set a resolution is just baffling. I have a 4k monitor, but for a GPU I have an RTX 2080 Super. I couldn't handle playing the game at 4k. So my workaround that I shouldn't have to take is open up my display settings and set my monitor's resolution to 1080p just to get a playable framerate. The lack of DLSS support is also a shame.

I'd love to give this a mixed review if I could. This definitely isn't the worst game of the year. It kept me addicted for 100 hours. However with how shallow quite a bit of the story is, and then comparing it to previous Bethesda titles, I wouldn't recommend buying this game at full price.

Can't recommend just because this game includes bloatware known as "Rockstar Games Social Club". Not only is this an unwanted program taking up space on my computer, I was inconvenienced for 5 minutes while I recovered my long forgotten account. Given how old this game is, I shouldn't have any sort of problems just pressing the big green "Play" button on Steam and not within bloatware.

While I find this game interesting, I just can't positively recommend a game with a false Steam Deck "Verified" status.

I was able to play for roughly 30 minutes into the tutorial, however after getting to your home base, hitting a loading screen was a death sentence. The game freezes and will not actually load.
I've validated the integrity of the game files, lowered graphic settings, turned battery saving all the way up on max conservation, even turned it off entirely with no luck. It was impossible to get back into the game after closing it.

I'm rewriting this with a recommended review instead of negative.
Originally I said that the game required an active internet connection on my Steam Deck, but after playing an additional 70 hours with weak/no internet, it's let me play just fine. I was originally frustrated that I was randomly asked to sign in again when I didn't have an internet connection, but since it hasn't bugged me. In total, I've had to sign in with Xbox twice: once when I first installed it and once right before I originally reviewed this.


Original Review:
This game is great and I would recommend it to anyone who likes community management and zombies as long as they have internet. However I will not recommend any game that requires internet to launch or play the game. I have this on my steam deck and it's failing to load offline and wants me to sign back into Xbox. Which by the way, I'm playing on computer, not Xbox, but at least Xbox is also Microsoft so that works. It's just frustrating to be forced to have an internet connection to play single player.

The game was really fun. Reminds me a lot of the classic Doom games. While I suggest anyone who likes classic shooters to play this, there is one pretty big issue I've had. It's not very optimized. I played it on my Steam Deck, and while it is verified by Steam, it can't hold 60 FPS, even with battery saving turned off. There were times I dropped to under 20 fps. So you do need a decent system to run this, even though the graphics are fairly simple.

Edit: I loaded the game on my desktop, and it's interesting. I have an AMD Ryzen 3900X CPU and an RTX 2080 GPU. I still can't get 60 FPS. It would appear that my CPU is a bottleneck as changing the screen resolution has no affect on performance. I could be playing at 4K or 1080p, I will still be around 40-50 FPS. Turning off real time lighting doesn't have an affect either, something is going on in physics processing that's making it difficult to run.

Reviewing the series as a whole, this series is a must experience if you want a good heart touching story. No game or movie has ever made me feel so emotional (I may or may not have cried) for any character, let alone two. I'm in a love/hate relationship with this masterpiece of a story.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the story and where it ends, the hate comes at the very end. I mean I'm glad it got a happy ending, I absolutely would have hated it if they didn't pull it back a notch there at the end. My hate stems from how I just can't say goodbye. After watching Clementine grow up and seeing what she's been through, she has a very special place in my heart and I just want more content. At the very end, the game sets up another Episode or Season (despite being called "The Final Season") where you play as a different character which has more than 4 choices of dialog, and they talk about meeting another character the next morning. Not to mention the previous games had 5 episodes, this one only has 4. It's not much but it really feels ready for a continuation that will never come.

I wouldn't say I want a proper conclusion because that would certainly end in Clementine's death, or really some of the newly introduced characters in Season 4 and I just don't want any more of them to die. What I really do want is to see what's next for Clementine and AJ. The ending is just so open to me that it just really feels like it ended at the wrong time. I said that we watch Clementine grow up throughout the series, and while that's mostly true, it's not entirely true. She's still a teenager in the final game and she possibly has a lot more of her life ahead of her. But we will never get to see what her life is actually like after the end.

Perhaps it's for the best it ended when it did. Another 5th episode probably would be devastating in that they'd kill all the characters you have come to love or enjoy, just like how most people you have met in the previous games have died. This series is riddled with loss, but that's part of what has built my attachment to Clementine. Every time she has lost one that she's truly cared about, I almost felt like I lost something too.

Again, this game series/story is a masterpiece for me, and is towards the top of my must play, or rather, experience games of all time. I would recommend anyone play it if they want a good story, just be prepared to struggle saying goodbye.

Update: after doing some looking around, there are some comic books that exist do continue Clementine's story which is exactly what I said I wanted. Except the new writer who wrote that book singlehandedly destroyed the points of seasons 3 and 4 with 2 sentences in the plot, and for that, I can't accept glorified fanfiction as canon. The plot says of the book Clementine Lives says "Clementine doesn't feel at home at the school and nothing makes her happy. Not even AJ can make her happy." The whole point of season 3 for Clementine was to get AJ back as they had been separated. The point of season 4 was to not only teach AJ to survive, but to find a home, as between seasons 3 and 4 they have been on the road a while and want to stop running. Well they found that by the end of season 4, and Clementine just suddenly isn't happy anymore, after everything she's lost? She's just going to throw what she had away? ♥♥♥♥ that and ♥♥♥♥ the comics. There are 3 comic books being written after Clementine Lives, and if you love this series, it might be a good idea to not read them. The new writer could have at least found a way to kill everyone, but even then that'd be a devastating blow below the belt that would really make the comic suck. But at least I could believe it.

Ignore my lack of playtime, I played this offline on my Steam Deck except for the final episode.

I bought this for my Steam Deck so I'd have a portable racing game to play on the go. I had the graphic settings on the lowest they could go and the game had a mostly solid 60 FPS. However the problem comes when you do your first expedition. I chose the cross country one. Up until this point, I've only had 2 crashes, but now it's crashing at roughly the same time every time I try. With the publisher behind this and how many Forza games there are now, this is unacceptable performance.

It's not just a crash either, it completely freeze up my Steam Deck. The game drops to 1 FPS for some unknown reason, my bluetooth audio gets super choppy, and the steam buttons stop responding to my input. The only way to get out of the freeze is to hold the power button until my device turns off.

The game was decent for the first 100 minutes that I've played, but now that I can't progress, I'm just not into the game anymore. Now I haven't tried looking at possible fixes, I just expected the game to work fine without much tinkering. But from how publishers are releasing games in poor states these days, those expectations are just too high I suppose. But I'm sticking to those expectations.

I bought this a while back while it was on sale because I wanted to play some classic and legendary maps. It works great on PC, if you have an internet connection. But I just can't recommend this game for the following 2 reasons:

1. This game is still full price. 10 years later, with 50 newer call of duties to choose from. No thanks, get this if you find a massive sale.

2. Despite likely paying FULL PRICE, you cannot access content YOU PAID FOR while offline. I mean, you can access story, but that's it. No zombies or multiplayer. In the console versions of this game, you have local play and can actually access your content without internet, this is a PC only issue.
I have a Steam Deck and wanted to play some zombies on the go, but you can't even get passed the zombies menu. So if you don't want to play the story and have a bad or non-existent connection, don't bother picking up this game.

The Shadows of Rose expansion is not fun. At all. The Additional Orders is quite fun though. But it doesn't justify a full $20 price tag, I'd wait for a sale.

This does contain some small spoilers, but nothing major.

The story and closure was nice, but the actual gameplay is far worse than the base game. There's no reason to explore except to find ammo if you need it, but even then, it's all very linear. There is no deviating from the one singular path.

My first playthrough was on standard, and it was manageable. The new enemy type is a worse bullet sponge than the base game, except there's now no block/guard or even a dodge. It's replaced with a focus ability that takes 1-3 seconds to stagger with focus (it seems to vary a little bit on certain enemies) - basically you're screwed.
On hardcore difficulty however, it is the worst experience of the game by far. I'm trying to re-100% the game since this adds a handful of new achievements to the game, one of them is to beat it on hardcore. The map is so close quarters that you can't run, and it takes a ton of bullets just to kill one enemy. Focus takes forever to activate as I said before, so you just die. That being said, I was just playing wrong. I'm editing this to say that I watch a speedrun of Shadows of Rose, and just sort of followed what they did, making it almost a walk in the park.

Another problem I have with Rose's story is the checkpoint system. One example is when you're fighting the guy with a mace and the Duke is watching, I got to the second stage of mace guy (I don't know his name). It spawns a bunch of mold, and 2 of the mold enemies. I tried to stagger them with focus, but they got to me before I could. When he was done sucking my face, it pushed me back into the mold, so I couldn't heal or even focus again. Then I got grabbed and he sucked my face again, leading to my death. But the checkpoint put me back to before the fight even began - before I even initiated the fight. So I'd have to get through stage one again and hope I can stagger the 2 mold guys in time.

Another thing that makes Rose difficult is the incredibly slow fire rate. Even with the pistol, you have to wait a solid second before you can fire again. Add on the fact that they are bullet sponges, enemies just don't want to go down.
Speaking of guns, you only get the weakest pistol and shotgun in the game. Since there's no merchant system like in the standard game, leaving you without upgrades. You're stuck doing minimal damage. There's no attachments you can pick up for the pump action shotgun, however there is an extended mag and a compensator. While the compensator does increase damage, it only lowers the amount of bullets needed to kill a weak enemy by just one bullet. It's hardly worth it.

In summary of the Shadows of Rose portion, it wasn't an enjoyable experience. The story was interesting and it added some unexpected closure to the main story. But the gameplay wasn't fun, at least not for me.

The main good part of this expansion is the Additional Orders. I've had a blast playing as Heisenberg and Dimitrescue. They are a bit overpowered, but that's part of the fun :^)
But with only half the DLC being properly enjoyable, wait for a sale before picking this up.