Recensioni recenti di Roenie

Image sharpening TO THE MOON and you can't disable it.
Terrible image quality, worst I think I've ever seen in a game.

DLSS off: Extremely oversharpened jpeg look.
DLSS on: Extremely blurry instead.
Both are pure eye cancer.

Everything has an oversharpened, grainy look to it. It's so much it causes halos around objects and destroys detail. So most likely too large a radius on the sharpening filter as well as the amount. It still ruins the image even when TAA is enabled as a softening method. The only way to avoid it is to enable DLSS and play an extremely blurry looking game. It's so bad I got very, very close to quitting altogether. Even the main menu text looks like crap due to the oversharpening. How could you miss that?

The sharpening was probably an attempt at making DLSS look less blurry except it doesn't do that, because the DLSS's level of blur is SO much that not even this extreme amount of sharpening can bring back any of that lost detail. Thus, the filter only makes things worse.

You can't turn off the motion blur either.
Film grain you can get rid of by setting post processing to medium.

There's a spacewalking sequence with the heaviest CA (chromatic aberration) I've ever seen that cannot be turned off, I tried by engine.ini editing and failed. One of the screenshots on the store page is from this particular sequence yet does not have the CA filter applied.

Devs quite often ruin their own hard work with stupid decisions around post processing but this is the worst I've ever seen that happen, which means I cannot recommend this game. I spent half my time trying to undo the damage, all to no avail. My edits in engine.ini even caused a crash at the end of a really crucial early game story sequence that I therefore had to repeat several times, going through many in-game steps.

I quote from the "Strengths" page of the developer's website: "We’re notorious for our attention to details. Whether it’s our crisp visuals..." - First of all, it's called attention to detail, not details in plural, but who cares about such details, right? Second, they misspelled crud visuals.

Gameplay: (space)walking sim with some clever puzzles that intensified toward the end but nothing TOO crazy.

Story: a nice space opera/drama worth experiencing. It's interesting but doesn't really hit you in the feels until right at the end. It would've been nice to have more of that earlier in the story. Holographic playback of past conversations between NPCs is a nice touch, System Shock 2 had some of that too back in the day. A welcome return of the feature.

It's worth 35% of the €25 asking price, for the story and unique setting (the moon). It's very short.

If you care about image quality, skip this title.

Best modern substitute for Scorched Tanks on the Amiga I've found to date, despite the fact that weapons are randomly assigned. I wish they'd add a mode where you could choose your loadout - with some restriction of cost per weapon - before a match, as another strategic layer that ST did have back in the day.

UPDATE 22-feb-2022:
Gave it another chance during free weekend. My opinion did not change.

----------

Doesn't scratch the Motocross Madness itch I've had since 1998.

I found the controls unintuitive. There is constant screen vibration that cannot be disabled.

Career mode won't let you stop playing when you want/need to: you have to do about 8 tracks on a map to reach the final track that finishes the map. If you quit before that, the map and all its tracks are gone, replaced by newly generated ones and you'll have to start over. I don't always have time for a whole series of tracks. I don't want to do that many in one sitting because the game is too boring for that. It gets repetitive pretty quickly.

I bought 5 new games. Descenders is the only one I requested a refund for.
Consider getting Lonely Mountains: Downhill instead. Review:
https://steamproxy.net/id/roenie82/recommended/711540/

Unsatisfying: The setting sun acts as a timer. When the light fades away your run ends, so you never get the satisfaction of finishing the level: it's generated to be endless. So all you achieve is a score on a leaderboard based on how far you got which just feels bad man, after sooo many restarts from the beginning because you crashed into something and had to learn the map the hard way. All you can do is try to grab the sparsely available speed pickups to go faster to get farther into the map to get a higher score before time runs out. The map gets more and more difficult until you either crash or the sun goes down so you never get closure. Each day you can only play 1 map, it gets replaced daily by a new one that can't be finished.

But it's very challenging, it's like drag racing with obstacles, squeezing through small gaps, many of which are moving. That's hard work, so you WANT that payoff that you finished a map, that you made it to the end, but you can't get it.

This game would've been great, if satisfaction, a payoff, or some type of closure had been part of its design. The only possible outcome is that you fail. IMO that's a design mistake.

I spent an hour and 20 minutes on today's one map, restarting from the beginning over and over. I made it to 5th on the leaderboard for this map. Of course I was still learning the game but my reflexes are much faster than most people's, even when measured today: I represented my country in a 1st person shooter called Unreal Tournament in the early 2000s. Today's daily map score leader had like 4x my score and his name's probably either God or Morpheus, I didn't check. So don't expect you're gonna get closure by getting the #1 daily score, but even if that was achievable by mere mortals, it would only last until tomorrow when there's a new map and the leaderboard is reset. You'll have nothing to show for it if you dedicate yourself to this.

The controls are very simple and steering feels smooth. The extreme focus needed, coupled with the art style and sound design make it a hypnotizing "zen" experience. If only it rewarded you for your effort.

To make them think about it, I almost want to ask the developer: Why? Why would I want to see how far I can get in tomorrow's map that never ends? For what reason?

[Update]: I checked out the next day's map and it was so similar at first I thought it was the same one. Both mostly gray and with the same types of obstacles.

If you take the original AC, reduce its framerate by 45-50%, make it look worse with less flattering lighting and post processing, then destroy what's left of the graphics with an awful blurry implementation of TAA, remove almost all of its content, butcher its FFB you get ACC.

ACC has too many jagged edges for SMAA to handle, so you can forget about using ReShade to replace the crap TAA.

All ACC's FFB does is offer some resistance and make the steering too light when there's any tire slip so that the cars feel dead and driving them is boring. Worst FFB of all the sims.

The 3D model of a GT3 car I tested in ACC is a copy/paste from the model in AC.

rFactor 2 when used with the right content (its newer/DLC stuff) beats AC and double beats ACC in terms of graphics, physics and driving feel / ffb, so if you want to step it up and race vs AI or increasingly rare hardcore leagues that use the most detailed simulation, get rFactor 2. If you want easy access to serious online "Competizione" use iRacing. ACC offers neither the best offline nor online. There is no reason to need or use it.

Some ships have "Hanger Bays". Confusingly, these don't launch clothes hangers at the enemy to give 'em all that Ikea has to offer, but small ships instead. Even though the game was made in Scandinavia.

The game is too basic for my taste, to the point I wouldn't call it space 4X. There's nothing to discover as far as "exploration" goes, no planets to govern in "expansion". Expansion is barebones: you grab a node icon by moving a fleet to it. Factions don't have faces or ideologies, they're merely a color on the map. For a 4X game there aren't a ton of game mechanic systems. It's more of a tactical combat game, but the combat IMO doesn't save it in the face of the lack of so much else. The combat is interesting but slow enough that it would've had to be more interesting than that. I found the overall game experience repetitive.

The scope of this project having been limited due to budget constraints and dev team size is as obvious as it is understandable. I was expecting more. I prefer GalCiv3 and Stellaris. It's probably an unfair comparison in terms of funds and team size, but that's where I'd rather spend my time. They easily could've turned this into one of those games that tries to do everything with little funds / too few people and have none of the game's systems actually working properly or user friendly. I appreciate at least they didn't do that here.

Pros:
+ Gorgeous looking ships. Larger game studios have delivered worse.
+ AA doesn't blur much, yet is effective
+ Text tutorial's writing very clear and to the point
+ Peek zoom (hold button to temporarily zoom out). Why doesn't every strategy game have it?

Mehs (this is the official term):
- Unity engine

Cons:
- Repetitive because of its simplicity / limited scope
- Nothing interesting to discover when you explore
- Can't rebind any controls (defaults work fine for me)
- Can't adjust WASD camera pan speed
The alternatives aren't ideal: panning with middle mouse (strenuous) or left mouse (accidentally select stuff)
- Only one of your fleets is allowed to move per turn
- I can't split up a fleet?
- Can't zoom in more to admire your ships on the ship upgrade screen
- Can't zoom in on galaxy map to admire your stuff, everything's an icon
- AI turns take a too long
- The turn based combat takes too long. Move one ship at a time, fire one weapon at a time, all manually.
- In combat, hexes are large and therefore few in order to restrict movement options. Ships have to face the correct way to fire. When a ship moves, its nose points in the direction it moved. It cannot rotate on the spot. Needs to take a detour but lacks the movement points to do that. This is supposed to be a tactical layer to the combat that imo feels too restrictive.
- No fps limiter

Misleading images on the store page - doesn't look nearly that good. Gameplay is a drag.

Gameplay
I was expecting passable gameplay. It isn't. Lame puzzles: position yourself to align objects in a straight line towards a door to unlock it. Find a shape that matches the one over there, steam jets out your ears until you finally see it. These two types of puzzle over and over. You run through invisible syrup: very slowly. Either that or you're fighting monsters dark souls style, except without the intricate combat mechanics that make DS fun. When all you want is just to advance to the next flipping story cutscene. It takes a lot of patience. I felt that surely I had more than surpassed the 2 hour mark for refunds but it had only been 90 minutes. And that includes time spent trying to fix the graphics: an hour, half of which was logged as playtime. Time drags on when you're bored and frustrated.

Graphics
Expectation: 10/10. Reality: 5/10. Take screenshot 3 on the store page for example, Senua's face is nowhere near that detailed in the actual game. E.g. those eyebrow hairs are replaced by single pixels in the game, and the details on her headband are almost entirely gone. It's false advertising. The game also relies heavily on AA filtering that blurs substantially for things to look right: if you force disable it through .ini file editing the game looks a grainy mess and if you don't, it looks blurred as if it's upscaled from lower resolution. Textures aren't great to begin with, so it's almost like playing a 720 to 1080p console game on a 1440p PC monitor. Applying sharpening through video drivers did not help: it cannot bring back detail that simply isn't there or has been blurred over that much. The character animations are good though especially in the in-engine cutscenes.

Story
Senua battles the voices in her head - the end: nothing about that ever changes. (I checked a let's play to confirm). I get it, to be unable to rely on your thoughts and memories is terrifying. I understood the point in the first 5 minutes. Actually I already knew before I even launched the game. The game wants to continue to hammer that same point home to you all the way until the credits roll. What good is excellent voice acting, if the script is so one dimensional?

Closing thoughts
There's another game I tried for the first time on the same day: Trackmania² Canyon, a much smaller budget title. Instant enjoyment and it looks good. That's a keeper. My purchase of Hellblade was refunded. Think about what YOU want from a game. If the masses like a game it doesn't mean you will. Experienced gamers who can tell the difference between good and bad gameplay: beware.

Great if you have a team of dedicated friends. Unplayable if you don't. Even if you have a team, think about how long they're likely to stay dedicated to it before buying this game.

Toxic
Siege is designed to be hyper competitive. This attracts the worst, most immature people. It then draws out the worst in them because it's designed to be stressful and punishing. Ubisoft does nothing (effective) to combat this problem. If you think people are going to stop screaming, raging, insulting people and praising Hitler through their mics so you can concentrate, you'd be wrong. If you're playing with random people, you are forced to permanently disable both text and voice chat to avoid the shocking toxicity, low IQ racism and vile slander you'll hear and read before and during almost every match, but the game is 100% about teamplay and completely falls apart without proper communication. Even if you turn off all communication, they'll sometimes still find a way to ruin the game further by teamkilling etc. The game is not playable unless you have a team of mature, dedicated friends to play with. It's a beautifully crafted, great looking, well optimised game with great shooting mechanics and always interesting gameplay...that cannot be played by the vast majority of people because they do not have a team. Since there's no server browser you can't choose a group of players you want to play with/against so you can't avoid the toxicity and incredible childishness, unless your entire team and the opposing team are on your friends list, allowing you to invite them into a custom game.

Too much complexity
Games can be TOO complex and Siege is one of them, if not the biggest offender because it pairs it with crazy time constraints and no respawns. Your success directly comes down to how much knowledge of the game you have. (Not your aim!) Expect to need 1000-2000 hours before you have enough information to get good at it. I'm not kidding. Until then you'll die over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, and each time you will have to wait for the next round to start which makes the experience extremely frustrating, even for someone like me with esports shooter experience and reaction times in the top 12%. (#1 ranked team on Clanbase for Unreal Tournament back in the early 2000s.) Get ready to study all the massive, insanely complicated maze like maps and the many hundreds of possible murder holes your enemies might create through various destructible walls and floors/ceilings. On top of a thousand other intricacies, so every time you get killed it will be because of something ELSE you didn't see coming.

Dedicate your life or GTFO
Basically, you can't learn the game if you aren't a child living with their parents, with all the time in the world. To learn the maps and how people play in them you really have to play one map for a few weeks before moving on to the next, but Ubisoft have made that impossible: there is always map rotation after every match. The new beginner mode called "newcomer" which is limited to players ranked 50 or lower (and pros with multiple accounts...), has 3 maps in rotation instead of the 12 that are in ranked mode, and in this game frankly 3 is still 2 too many. They're not putting you in charge of your experience. Ubisoft give you two options: play something other than Siege, or dedicate your life to Siege. Nothing in between.

You don't get enough time for almost anything, e.g. mere seconds to - from a grid of small descriptionless icons - pick the operator you want to play as and weapon loadout for whatever map the game decides to load, or doing pre-match recon with your drone and finding a place to hide it from enemy fire. If you don't know the maps by heart you typically run out of time droning before it even reaches an enemy/objective. Each game is on a 3 minute timer. It's all very restrictive, and so are your options for what kind of game you want to start.

Too restrictive
There is only one game mode in ranked play: bomb. The game decides the settings/rules for it, who you'll play with, who you'll play against, and everything else. No server browser, no map choice unless you're able to invite 9 other players from your friends list into a "custom game". Even in a custom game you don't get enough control over the countdown timer that restricts character selection, the pre-match recon phase and the action phase. You bought the game, you should be able to play it the way you want to.

No singleplayer content
The "terrorist hunt" mode vs bots is just there as a warmup before you join the matchmaking queue to play against other players. It's not enough to keep you interested if you don't want to play pvp. The bots don't play even remotely like humans do, they don't act tactically and are too scripted. The singleplayer "scenarios" vs bots are there so you can experience the basic mechanics of the game before going online.

Frustration and waiting
Siege is more frustrating than even Hearthstone. There's no respawning. That's fine if you never die to causes outside your control, but that's just not how Siege works. Quite often you'll die right as the match round starts due to random BS and have to wait in spectator mode roughly 5 minutes until the next round kicks off.

Example 1: Inside a huge building (a bank), just as I vaulted over a ledge from one room into the next, an enemy from all the way outside the building decided to shoot out a door barricade through a glass window at just the right horizontal and vertical angle for me to accidentally get headshot through the barricade, mid vault. I wasn't behind the door, I was 5 paces away from and off to the side of it. I wasn't visible to the attacker. Dumb luck on his part.

Example 2: In the 2 games after that, I used my drone to check if a room was clear. It was. I entered the room and got shot both times, because an enemy had entered the room just as I switched from drone view to 1st person and walked in. They weren't expecting me but they know where the door is, so already aim at it. When you enter the door, you have to scan the whole room so if droning is useless you simply die. No matter how good you become, you'll always have permadeaths you couldn't avoid.

Gambling for glory
Like Hearthstone, Siege keeps you coming back for the moments when it all comes together, the moments that make it addictive, but they are rare. Meanwhile not everyone realises they are doing a ton of waiting and feeling frustrated, only having fun 1/3rd of the time spent. It's like gambling, when you think about it: maybe you'll pull it off next time. Even if you play really well you're not necessarily going to get a result. For that, there are just too many variables.

My all-time kill/death ratio with my favorite operator (Buck with marksman rifle) is 0.82, so I died more often than I killed enemies. Today I played very well and/or had decent fortune with the Thermite operator and got a 1.25 ratio. If you're good at Siege, on average you'll trade kills/deaths 1 to 1. As your rank improves, so does your opposition due to matchmaking. So it will stay roughly 1:1 and you're gonna do a lot of waiting for the next round to start. Don't expect to rise above that by dominating a public match like top players can do in Unreal / Quake. Those games don't do matchmaking by rank.

In conclusion
I want to like Siege more than any other game because the core shooter experience is so visceral and the abilities (skills) of the characters paired with destructible walls and ceilings make for interesting and exciting gameplay but Siege just leaves me frustrated every time I try to get into it. The walls in it might be penetrable, the game itself is not and you have to play it with the absolute worst kind of people.

..which also means I can't enable comments, because I know exactly what would happen....sorry.

The good:
It looks and runs fantastic, and I thoroughly enjoyed finishing the entire campaign + the DLC missions. The maps are large and designed beautifully. It's a graphics engine technical marvel and level design masterclass. The sound is good and so is the gunplay. It's a really fun game to play, that gets almost everything right.

The bad:
The things it doesn't get right aren't just minor gripes. Very unrealistic gamey scope mechanics, exaggerated ballistic bullet dropoff, range is a mere few hundred metres; not much of a sniper simulation, more of a 1st person shooter *game* with sniping. You're regularly forced to fight many enemies at midrange and in close quarters. Stealth is basic and typically short lived. Custom difficulty settings are broken in co-op, and custom is the best way to play as it offers finer control over AI difficulty and HUD features. Unfortunately after loading a save the guest player will see all the enemies on his radar again despite the host having disabled it, etc.

Verdict:
On paper it should have been a thumb down due to the flaws being so fundamental to a sniper game. And the other unique draw, co-op campaign play is flawed too, by an annoying bug with difficulty settings. I still enjoyed it a ton playing through the campaign missions, so should I thumb it up? Yes, but it's not for scope purists who know how they actually work IRL.