Recent reviews by Renstik

I played this a little thanks to Steam sharing via my friend's library and all I can say for now is that this game is grossly overpriced. It's a cool little indie experiment that can be quite impressive at times in terms of its scope, but as a whole this game feels more like an early-access title worth $10-$20 rather than a full $60 AAA release.

Gameplay can become repetitive very quickly due to the game's lack of depth and content. Yes, it is vast thanks to the rather impressive procedural generation that it uses, but it is still procedural generation. The game only as 2-3 GB of content, and this can become very apparent as quickly as two hours in. Once you've seen and done the limited amount of original things you can see and do, gameplay becomes samey and boredom can set in soon after as the game quickly becomes nothing more than a grinder. Many people don't mind this grind-like gameplay, and I myself sometimes don't mind simply exploring some planets and mining some materials to improve my equipment. However, this barebones gameplay will be very boring and displeasing to many other people, and the amount of content that it offers should definitely not be priced so highly.

There are also a number of performance problems. I have a pretty high-end PC but my framerate drops below 60 when I'm entering a planet's atmosphere or sometimes randomly via hitching, and my framerate ranges widely from 60-120 in all other situations (max settings 1080p.) Also the controls, while decent, are poorly implemented when it comes to flying the spaceship, which is quite a pain to do with a keyboard and mouse. Keys are fully rebindable as far as I know though, so at least there's that. Also the menus are fairly easy to navigate, however it should be noted that changing any graphics options (even changing the resolution and window size) requires a game restart, which is ridiculous. One last quick complaint is that I personally think the max FOV should be a bit highter (right now it's barely good enough for me.)

I could go into more detail about all the game's problems, but there are plenty other reviews for that, so I'll just cut to the chase. No Man's Sky is a fairly enjoyable space exploration survival/crafting thingy (assuming you can run it at a decent framerate), but is certainly is NOT a complete AAA title worthy of the $60 price tag, so my advice would be to wait until this game gets a serious discount before purchasing. I'm glad I didn't pay $60 for it, and I'm sure that if you ever pick it up for a discounted price or share it off a friend, you will think the same.

On release day, my friend bought the game and recommended that I do the same. Neither of us had ever played a Witcher game, but we heard that the last couple were good, so we gave this one a shot.

I thought this game would be good, but instead it exceeded every expecation I had in spectacular fashion.

Gameplay - fun, challenging combat, fantastic quests (the side quests are just as interesting and fun as the main quests), and your choices matter, thanks to the game's ridiculous amount of endings.

Story - every good adjective I can think of. Andrzej Sapkowski's vision of a lore-filled and vast fantasy world filled with so many interesting characters is masterfully given form.

Music - solid all-around soundtrack that adds life to the entire experience.

Graphics and Performance - a beautiful game even on low-medium settings, and it runs like a beauty as long as you don't get overzealous and crank everything higher than your build can handle. I recommend turning the fancy hair graphics off completely, and then it shouldn't take much tweaking to get good performance.

Marketing - thought I'd include this because CD Projekt Red is the super hero of game developers. They charge $60 for a game that has a ~60 hours camaign and loads of other hours in the form of side quests and activities, not to mention the quality of all those hours of content. Then, they make a kickass DLC with about 12 hours of content and charge $10 for it. The next DLC costs $20, and it delivered upwards of 30 hours of the same quality content (plus a feakin' entirely new zone) I had already experienced from the base game and the first DLC (for some reason they called it a DLC and not The Witcher 4: Blood and Wine).

Negatives - very few, and overall the good FAR outweighs the bad. Your player does move a bit clunkily (movement is clearly favored towards consoles), and you aren't able to customize your character or do crazy, random actions the way you can do in similar games like Skyrim. Although I do not think this, some say that they feel the combat is clunky, too challenging, or just not fun. There have also been a decent number of bugs in the game, but most have been ironed out through updates by now. **WARNING: This game is NOT for you if you have little time on your hands and/or do not enjoy taking breaks from the action to engage in dialogue and story. Some dialogue scenes are lengthly, and although the dialogue itself is superb, many gamers may be turned off by the idea of dedicating so much time to the story and plot choices.**

Unless you dislike every good aspect that I have just described, do yourself a favor and purchase this game. It's worth it.

Let me put it this way. There are a lot of great games out there. Many of them are immersive RPGs with tons of content or engaging shooters. After many hours of playing these games, I usually feel quite satisfied with the experience provided.

One Finger Death Punch gave me that multi-hour satisfaction within a time span of five minutes, through the ridiculously fun destruction of my enemies.

Don't question it. Just buy it.

Though you are not always in full control of what your character does all the time, this point-and-click game has enough gameplay, a load of tough decisions, and an excellent story for me to give it a reccomendation. The ending is truly heart-breaking.

These games do a much better portrayal of Batman than today's movies.