Recent reviews by Octogenarian

Let us start with the good, the game looks great the animations while they sometimes fight gameplay look great most of the time and the audio design may be among the best for any MMO in my experience. I am a crafting focused player and always have been and the gathering and crafting at least initially has a fine core loop but then it falls apart with an abominable grind that was just made worse for arbitrary reasons. (To set the scene for grind I wish to point out that I have sunk many hours into UO/EQ1/Lineage/EVE/WoW among others over the past 15 years, I know well the pain of the grinds of yore.)

So the bad... well everything else. There are glaring bugs, cs is awful, the economy which wished to be EVE-esque is inherently flawed due to server size meaning no influx of new players turning the linked tiers into a funnel not a pyramid. In game trading has been turned off on three occasions due to duplication exploits while costs and taxes remain. Essentially the game has adopted every single annoyance and hurdle from the mobile f2p space in what I can only assume is preparation to charge for QoL improvements. A vast majority of features do not work properly. Even in client icons get randomly assigned to items after a short while playing. The chat system is the worst I've seen for years and most of them are bad. UI design beyond combat is exceedingly inefficient and fights you continually, each patch introducing new and exciting forms of input lag making the PvP side of things unenjoyable.

On the server I play one of the botting "players" farming is so well known it was a laughing matter in global when someone managed to train enough mobs on him to kill him. I have reported that particular char daily for several weeks while the bot remains unfactioned at lvl30+ and runs the same route. This in and of itself is minor but it also makes one fear that the "resolution" to previous duplication exploits has been equally underwhelming. They have managed to make a cash grab without the grab yet alienated players of many types. I write this only as I lament the waste of a very promising core that I fear is now permanently tainted. This is accurate as of patch 1.1 which instead of bringing hope of the state of the game improving made it worse.

At 0.01 an hour it may seem odd to say that this is a complete waste but as with all MMOS good friends and a few drinks will make you play far beyond what you should. If you have not played, stay your wallet hand.

I backed this very early on pre its steam debut and I have not regretted it. Infact the initial playable alpha was so polished for what it was that I chose not play any more of the game until its completion. I have dipped back in never progressing further than my first foray to check on the progress and this is truly a shining example on how a kickstarter / early access game should be run.

Can i verify that the story and the complexity is as good as the taste I have had? No. Is everything I've seen a solid indication that it may well be? Yes!

This will save me until the next Fallout proper installment.

I do wish there was a third option taking the middle road between recommending and decrying a game as this title would have earned it.

I am exceedingly fond of the world created in Bioshock and Bioshock II, I find the art style fantastic, the art deco aesthetic is pulled of in detail and the world is engagingly complex.

In infinite however the complexity is all gone so while it is beautiful and visually enjoyable the mechanics are lacking. It feels dumbed down due to console constraints and few things irk me as much as that. This is not saying that the previous titles didn't have heacy tendencies toward console simplification too but it has been kicked up another couple of notches and that is depressing. The game is still worth it for the story and the visuals but only once and the DLC to date is severely lacking.

I was positively drooling to get to revisit an unspoiled rapture but the story so far is short, weak and only very shortly set in an uncorrupted setting. I would have loved for this to approach the playstyle complexity of the original Deus Ex but instead it heads straight to irrelevance. I will recommend it but only when it is on sale.

In essence this is not your uncles RPG / FPS crossover, infact it is neither FPS nor RPG it is a 3D graphical novel with a limited combat model that feels slow clunky and incomplete. It is also beautiful and enjoyable for a straight playthrough but no more than that.

It may quite possibly be nostalgia talking but I played this to death in my youth. It is a deep and wonderful RPG in many ways and although it is dated the basic story and the wealth of items and choices is still enjoyable. This is the pedigree from which games like Legend of Grimrock stem and while it isn't as pretty as modern incarnations it is still very atmospheric.

The RPG "simulation" is substantially more complex than what is common in modern games and that makes it necessity to read through the manual at least in part. Everything from attacks to spells have modifiers and classes have a diverse set of mechanics. This in turn means that some classes are weak and brittle until relatively late in the game when they blossom into excellent additions.

There is no hand holding and the assumptions you make when exploring will influence what ending you will get. The feature to bring the party forward to subsequent games is laudable and it was a novel experience when the game was fresh.

I am far less enamoured of the next installment probably because the port to my chosen platform was hideously broken, sluggish and failed to include the party import but the "Bane" was installed for years on my PowerBook 165c, infact that old hunk of plastic still runs and this is still one of the games installed.

In summary at the current Winter Sale price it is well worth adding to your library just for the hell of it and just while playing enough to be allowed to review it I once again got stuck rolling characters to get that perfect race / profession combination. I find it especially heart warming that the copy protection is still in there even if it has been disabled, while I did own the game the tiny irksome nature of looking up codes lent me to learn some basic 68k assembly.

It is highly recommended that you set it to keyboard control only to save on some fiddly clicking as using the arrow keys is substantially faster,.

Third times a charm. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is fantastically atmospheric, wonderfully free and the handholding is at a minimum. It still has flaws, technical and conceptual but they are easy to forgive and unlike the previous installments not a big deal. Well worth it's price and the scope of what has been attempted is heartening in a world of console streamlining.

Pleasantly surprised to say the least. The 3D evolution of the Fallout universe has added rather than subtracted from the format. The ironic whimsy is still there and the world is large open for exploration and feels very non-linear. Each playthrough is new and to a surprisingly large extent fresh. I eagerly await the next installment.

Some of the "expansions" are better than others but they are all worth playing.