Recent reviews by Roenie

Locked to 60 fps and blurry scaled graphics when you zoom in to a comfortable level. UI scaling also blurry. No graphics settings at all, not even resolution. Basic even by indie game standards, is this a mobile port? Bad weird main/settings menu without any design to it using basic Unity gray menu item background doesn't have the options you would want.

The gameplay doesn't do it for me either. Why even have the downtime of having to fly to mission start points and back to base every time when the space you traverse doesn't feel like space as it's a simple background image with some dots on it? Very annoying clunky minigame having to reach a specific docking point on a ship that's trying to get away from you. Gameplay once you've docked is basically Hotline Miami so I'm bored within the first hour. Overall, too "indie" as in stripped down to core gameplay only and technically simplistic for my taste. The levels (ship interiors that boil down to abstract square rooms connected by corridors) should've been in 3D or higher resolution so you could zoom in to a comfortable level without them getting blurry due to the scaling.

After uninstallation, the game left behind a folder in AppData\Roaming. Devs shouldn't leave that behind without asking because if the reason you're uninstalling is that you don't like the game you don't want to keep your saves and settings.

There's a lot to complain about and I'll get into that below, but despite all that it is still a unique immersive experience that I do quite enjoy. It's fun to choose your weapon loadout to hunt with, it's relaxing to roam around nature reserves and they look stunning. Depth to the sneaking and shooting mechanics keeps you engaged. You never know what's going to happen. It varies between slow and (very) exciting. For example, you may suddenly be charged by a bear while you have your pea shooter out lining up a shot on a small animal. No two sessions are the same.

There are far too many. Here's some examples. There's an age old bug causing region names to no longer appear on the map so you don't know where a mission is trying to tell you to go. I found a dirt road texture hovering above the ground where it was supposed to be. Grass (which is everywhere) will flicker on a map released 5 years ago, but not consistently. One playsession it will be fine, the next it'll happen constantly. I keep running into glitched spots where one block of terrain meets another with an invisible collision box that makes you walk straight up into the air instead the direction you're trying to go. Iron sights are often misaligned. You sometimes crawl through rocks instead of over them when prone. There are white lines connecting parts of mountains and hills together like glued back together ceramic vases.

The devs' parent company recently opened a new office in Manhattan, one of the most expensive locations on the planet. Now you know where all that DLC money is going instead of being used to hire QA testers and programmers focused on bug fixing.

The reason this developer still exists is a lack of serious competition in a niche genre.

There are so many examples of this I could spend hours listing them all. I'll mention a few so you kinda get the idea. No reward for exploration despite awful movement over rough terrain, can't interact with objects (there aren't any character animations for that) or even knock over a trash bin. Lookout towers, important locations, are copy/pasted clones with no interaction with any of the furniture inside - you can only open/close doors. Opening / closing a glass sliding door out to the porch, the same audio sample is played as for a normal wooden door inside. Trampolines outside cannot be used and if you jump on one from a higher position you'll land on the air above it, unable to reach its surface. Shooting a soccer ball instead of an animal will make the ball bleed because a bloody decal is placed on it.

The maps have nature and animals, that's it. Nothing else. You can either shoot the animals or be bored out of your skull. What if I get bored of shooting animals, you ask? My point exactly, even though that will keep you busy for longer than you think there's obviously an expiration date.

Collisions between animals and the quad bike (ATV DLC) are all wrong and result in the player taking HP damage, seeing a red flash and just bouncing off of the animal which doesn't even get pushed off its course it was running on.

There's points of interest with flavor text and a handful of "artifacts" to be found through exploration of each map/reserve. They're so lame it's laughable that the developer thinks these are truly interesting to the player. Makes you feel like the game designer has never played a game before. It's just filler.

No gamma/brightness settings, no fps limiter. The only anti-aliasing modes available are "FXAA" and "FXAA + TAA". You can't enable contact shadows (which add a lot of nice contrast to grass / foliage) without enabling "FXAA + TAA". Without AA, tree canopies are unrealisticially pixel-y / grainy and both AA modes on offer degrade the raw image quality by softening things too much. Only when "FXAA + TAA" is enabled does the game let you enable sharpening (a custom amount) and it's not able to undo all of the damage. As another side effect of TAA, canopies (and grass) in motion are smeared out blobs until they stop moving.

The game is very, very light on story. You don't meet NPC's in the actual game world. Missions are presented by voice over + on screen static avatar in the UI. They're tasks with some made up reason / background info for them handed to you in what is mainly a sandbox experience of hunting animals on a vast map. By tasks I mean, e.g. kill animal type X from a hunting stand in location Y. There may not even be any of those animals in that area which is another problem with the game. After waiting several in-game days I ended up using the ATV DLC to scare animals into the area from elsewhere. (Essential DLC if you don't want to spend hours walking to get from A to B.)

It takes a huge amount of patience to play theHunter. I still enjoy the game but it's definitely not for everyone. If you run or even just walk upright through vegetation, you'll spook every animal and never even see any. You have to slow yourself to a crawl, often literally. It's fun to mess around with different weapon loadouts. This game is to hunting almost what Sniper Elite 4 is to sniping: somewhat game-ified. E.g. ammo calibres aren't realistic.

It won't make most people's all-time top 10 but it has enough going for it to be some people's absolute favorite game. It offers a unique, slower paced, immersive experience with plenty of exciting moments too. After hundreds of hours I personally still enjoy it a lot. Objectively it's about a 7.5 out of 10 as the lack of production quality and devs' carelessness detract from the experience. If the devs weren't so lazy it could've easily been a 9 out of 10.

Jaw dropping maps. Not as good as Tomb Raider 2013. Absolutely amazing leveldesign but the crashes, bad performance and trying to be a collectathon really hold it back. I recommend the 2013 remake instead, I enjoyed it more, it ran better and was stable. After that, you can just skip ahead to Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Unless you're into leveldesign in which case you've gotta see this.

Cons

• Bad DX11 performance, good DX12 performance
  
• Crashes every 10 mins in DX12 mode
  
• Last part crashes in DX12 mode, requires DX11 mode to finish
  
• Insane amount of collecting stuff, some of which is required
  
• Encourages backtracking to previously explored maps that you cannot fully complete without some item, gear or skill unlock you get later.
  
• Can't always interact with objects you're right in front of. You then have to turn around, walk back, turn back around and walk towards it again.
  
• On occasion Lara falls to her doom through no fault of your own.
  
• Story could've been better.
  
• As my playthrough went on, more and more I started to beeline toward the primary objective / ending, ignoring the mundane collect / destroy this & that "challenges" and many of the optional challenge tombs. The challenge tombs I did clear hadn't been all that interesting. They were just OK.
  
• Assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns.... too much combat for a TR game, but that goes for the 2013 remake and probably Shadow of the TR as well.

Pros

• The combat is decent, at least.
  
• The gameplay holds your interest from start to finish. New mechanics are slowly introduced throughout the entire campaign.
  
• No quicktime events, maybe one or two that I recall
  
• Nice variety of climbing equipment
  
• Decent pacing (intense, then calm, back to intense and so on)

I'll never understand why raiding tombs is optional in a game called Tomb Raider.

Pales in the light of Portal.

It's a light matter maybe, but after uninstalling, it leaves behind 3 folders in subfolders of AppData (C:\Users\Username\AppData\). It didn't ask if I wanted to remove those as well. Had to check for and delete them manually. How did I know they're there then? Experience....I know what to expect these days. One is named Tunnel Vision (the dev) and two are named Aspyr (the publisher), iirc. I appreciate being able to play the first hour to try before you buy, but do clean up after yourselves please, devs.

I finished it in under 2 hours and I'm still recommending it which speaks volumes to the quality. Best voice acting I've ever heard in a game and I've played a LOT of games since the 90s. Beware it's a very sad story, it lingers in your head for a good while after. So play it when you feel balanced and confident that you can handle the gut punch and clear your schedule for the rest of the evening.

Like in a good movie, there is clever symbolism and foreshadowing much of which you will probably overlook at first but starts to fall into place after you've finished the story and go over it again. After the ending at first I thought: "What was the point of this story, other than to make me feel sad?" and I could easily have left a negative review if I hadn't given it some time to mull it over, because there isn't any real gameplay - it's almost like a walking simulator/visual novel. So without a point to the story, something to learn from it, there wouldn't have been a point to the whole thing.

Without spoiling the story itself, what I think the devs want you to learn from it about life is: We chase achievement in life to leave our mark on the world, make our parents proud and be appreciated by strangers and the game reminds you that the positive mark you've already left on your family (and friends) who love you - just by existing and being you, is greater than you think and is actually what really matters. They really don't care, in a sense, whether you achieve greatness at anything or not. Chase dreams if you want to, but value your relationships and yourself irrespective of your success or lack thereof.
I can tell you this in words but for it to really hit home you have to experience the game for yourself. That's why it's good. The way it's told and how it makes you experience and feel the story. This is why I roll my eyes when my aging mother who has never played a game in her life, craps on the medium of videogames because "it's all just guns and violence".

I used mouseclicks to advance, it's fine to do so, way more comfortable, reliable and less strenuous than trying to postpone your blinks but I can't speak to how much the blinking mechanic would add to the experience as I haven't tried it. I would say the story hits hard enough without it.

Extremely frustrating trial & error gameplay.

It forces you to restart from checkpoint to repeat the same rooms over and over. Margin for error is very small, you have to be fast but movement is sluggish and the objective often won't be clear until you've failed a few times. The game is slow to restart you from checkpoint when you die. I was gonna finish the game but I'd rather pee into the wind so I've uninstalled it and deleted my saves.

92% positive because 92% of reviewers became teenagers after the games industry turned to ♥♥♥♥ and have never played a good game in their life. Days Gone is everything I hate about modern big budget games. The title Days Gone refers to the good days of the games industry 20+ years ago.

- The writing sucks
- The characters' acting sucks
- The boring unoriginal repetitive 3rd person action gameplay sucks
- The bland, lifeless open world sucks
- The busywork sucks
- The missions suck - they're annoying AF
- The pacing sucks
- The clunky movement sucks
- The generic combat sucks
- The "bike" handling sucks
- The "bike" physics suck
- The gathering of fuel for your super thirsty bike sucks
- Gathering scrap to keep repairing the bike sucks
- Holding E for a few seconds to loot / interact with everything sucks
- Gathering plants / herbs sucks. Having to hold E makes it double suck
- Too many crafting / loot / gear / supplies management menus also sucks
- Burning all the piles of twigs ("zombie nests") sucks (busywork)
- Completionist style tasks required for regular ingame "progress" / rep sucks
- Maybe it opens up more later, but 3 hours into it progression is still linear which feels at odds with an open world setting, with cutscenes forcing themselves upon you whenever you reach the next scripted point, which kinda sucks
- The consolitis checkpoint save system definitely sucks(*)
- Console games suck

* The save system gives you the illusion that you can manually save anywhere but when you load the save you're back at a checkpoint from an hour ago. You can't name your saves, the name is the time, not the time of saving but an older time that corresponds with when the last checkpoint was reached. So if you save again 10 minutes later, that save will have the exact same name as the previous save. You can't discern between the two nor do you need to because they will load the same checkpoint. When you figure this out and realize you have 10 extra saves all with the same name and time that are all useless because they all point to the same checkpoint, naturally you would want to delete these unnecessary saves from your list, and of course you can't. You can't delete saves in a console game, what did you expect? They are stored in your windows profile\AppData\Local on C so have fun doing it manually. Everytime you load a save it creates a new autosave file there instead of overwriting a previous autosave.

A group of enemies pin down the main character's friend and blowtorch his arm to a crisp (in one spot) until all the skin is off his entire lower arm (after the cutscene) and he basically just shrugs it off without proper medical assistance. He has no problem riding on the back of your bike and afterwards having a normal calm conversation. He just wants to lie down for a bit after arrival and asks you to "find something for his arm". If this was reality the guy would need a skin transplant and antibiotics or he'd die from infection or necrosis, and without morphine he would've passed out from the pain.

It's a Sony exclusive console game ported to PC. It was ported very well for once (except the checkpoint save system that they should've ditched for PC) but why did I expect a good game? lol... console games are garbage.

PC Gamer magazine wrote:
"Deeply joyless. Dreary story, repetitive missions, sluggish controls, and lifeless world."

Robo_Steve on Metacritic wrote:
Incredibly boring, unoriginal and repetitive game play. Awful story. For some reason this game has legions of fanboys that defend it to the hilt.

I know the reason they defend it. It's right at the top of this review.

P.S.
VRR flicker with g-sync on VA panel monitor could not be eliminated. The ingame fps limiter does a bad job of smoothing out frametime variance. MSI Afterburner's frame limiter (RTSS) does a better job but it's not perfect and the game still has a knack of causing VRR flicker. So if you have a VA monitor, expect to be forced to use v-sync and suffer the inputlag.

Tedious, repetitive, slow, grindy.

You can't carry nearly enough in your 12-slot backpack to gather resources, you can only gather once per day with one character. Every day your NPCs require food, cooking uses up wood, every action takes an artificial amount of time in the form of a progress bar/circle... and once a day ends it's time to sleep and in the morning everone's hungry again - you get the idea.

Resource gathering, crafting and that type of "progression" to unlock things I wasn't expecting from a game from 2014. I guess this disease in game design dates back longer than I thought.

Mr. Prepper is a similar game and I actually enjoyed that more than this. I wouldn't recommend either of them.

This dev has 0 respect for their customers. v1.0 Streamer Weekend lets streamers play the test branch version of 1.0 three days before early access backers who have been waiting for over 10 years and will have to wait until after the weekend. Now 1.0 is more like 0.5 in reality but that's not the point. Why are streamers getting access to something that non cringe customers aren't. Starting an Indian caste system in gaming are we?

Excellent translation of the FEEL of snowboarding and skiiing IRL. The sound of the snow under your board/skis is realistic and the animations are on point. Excellent open world maps that feel like mountain ski resorts that could exist for real, if real life was a little better than real life. There is lots of exploring to do. It's a very calming, "zen" experience, great stress/anxiety relief. The art style is idyllic and cute without being childish. The music does get very repetitive.

You can do spins, flips and rolls, there are trick challenge trails with scores to beat, but this isn't Tony Hawk Pro Skater in the snow. The controls are still challenging but less complex than that. You can freely switch between twin tip skis, twin tip snowboard, carve skis and carve snowboard.

Depth is limited because it was originally a mobile game. I'm 12 hours in and have explored half of the available maps. My current estimate is that I'll get about 20 hours out of it. Once I've explored all the maps I can't see myself playing for too much longer. That is the nature of exploration games. More interaction with NPCs, buildings and objects not for boarding/skiiing on would've been nice.While you can punch to knock over random skiers to get a small speed boost, you can't knock on any doors. NPCs don't intently skiing/snowboarding with you, they just kinda randomly move about and you can't have a conversation with them. There is no story of any kind.

There's not a lot of graphics settings. Luckily I didn't need them. Other than choosing whether you want v-sync or not there is no need to change much. A lot of games have super blurry anti-aliasing or chromatic aberration that you have to (try to find a way to) disable, that's not the case here. It looks great out of the box and performance is great too.