Recent reviews by rpgchuck

Starfield is a poorly designed game, coupled with critical bugs that show an absolute disregard for the customers who purchased the game.

Every encounter is with dozens of enemies who always have the high ground, and frequently surround you. When fighting at long range, the computer has perfect accuracy on shots, frequently ignores cover, and combines that with invisible walls that turn hits into misses every time. Enemies are also complete bullet sponges.

This game's definition of "difficulty" is built around this combination of bugs left carefully in place, and conscious design decisions built around attritional difficulty. The game literally designs single encounters to run you out of medpacks.

As with combat, exploration is tedium combined with unfixed bugs, 2 years after the game's release. Environmental hazards are jacked up such that getting out of your ship and walking 100 meters has you already taking damage. This is, again, combined with encounters of a dozen or so opponents, who have the high ground and their (I assume this is at least purposeful) unerring long-range accuracy.

The combination of a bug causing the planet's environment to ignore my suit, and remove my boostpack, while simultaneously inflicting poison damage, while I was being attacked by a dozen zealots was on one of the first missions of the entire game.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that I played this game to completion, because I had to see if it got better. This is the company that gave us Skyrim after all, one of my favorite games. I couldn't believe the game would actually stay THIS BAD.

In fact, the final mission in the game was actually worse. Enemies that can spawn endless duplicates of themselves (with rocket launchers, naturally), who teleport away every time you attack them, and run you through one shooting gallery after another (I believe there are six total shooting galleries) all in a bid to, again, run you out of healing. That's right, the game has MULTIPLE encounters like this.

This game has that Bethesda magic in spots, as long as you are only doing procedurally generated missions. The moment you engage with either the main story, or a faction questline, you will be subjected to numerous attritional encounters, where bugs combine with stunningly bad, unfixed bugs.

This game has no respect for you or your time, nor does it really seem to give a damn if you have fun. It is without a doubt the worst Bethesda game ever, and I have played every game they have developed since Morrowind.

If you're considering buying this game on a holiday sale, as I did, do yourself a favor and skip it. No matter the price, you could find something better to spend it on.

This game is missing basic features to streamline its building mechanics and simply put, does not respect the player's time. I am not investing time in a boring, grindy, survival sandbox in the hope that it will eventually become engaging.

I started a new game with the Anniversary Edition and it's more Fallout 4, which is a good thing. There's more creations, including some by stalwarts of the modding community, like Degenerate Dak, but also creations from Bethesda. The game doesn't look or play differently, in my personal experience. I also had several mods installed, and just left them installed to see what happened on a new game, and all are working fine.

So from my perspective, this is a clear win, that will hopefully keep Fallout 4 vibrant until Fallout 5 comes around.

New content, new bugs. The corvettes expansion is yet another in a long line of free content that makes the core game even more saddled with bugs. What is the point of a snazzy new ship if it prevents you from teleporting to a base. And the work around is to put your base gate 250 units from the base in one direction, and the base computer 250 units in the opposite direction, and that only kind of works.

This is a complete mess. The developer should be embarrassed that the game is still like this after 9 years.

Steam asked me if I wanted to update my review, so here goes:

I decided to check out some of the game's more challenging encounters, specifically: The Sentinel Walker, requiring the player to beat 5 waves of sentinels, culminating a boss, the walker. When I defeated it, it dropped an empty loot container. The game then told me it was underground, while also telling me there were zero active sentinels. I didn't get any rewards.

The Vile Brood Queen. When I defeated this boss encounter, I again got nothing. Google says that's fine, that this encounter isn't guaranteed to provide a reward. You mean like the Sentinel Walker?

Finally, defeated a pirate dreadnought the "hard way", by not destroying its engines, but going after its shields to get the S class freighter upgrade. It did in fact drop the upgrade (hey!) but after I summoned my freighter and installed the upgrade, the freighters I had just saved turned on me and tried to destroy me.

According to Google, not even landing on the space station is enough to clear my "hostile status", I have to quit the game.

Quitting the game might be the best advice Google has ever given me.

Really enjoying the game so far, love the ages system, and the civilization-specific civics trees really make each Civilization feel more unique.

Having now completed the game once, my review remains positive. I enjoyed the addition of an economic victory to the game, and from what I have seen, the militaristic path is better than it was in Civ VI, where it was focused completely on Capital cities.

If you like supers, RPGs with great character building and exploration, along with some nice cutscenes, or even if you just want a game to scratch that XCOM itch, this game delivers. It has been a blast through 57 or so hours. Really enjoying it so far.

Great survival RPG. The mechanics are extremely interesting.

The best version of one of the best games ever made.

Great space sim. Decide what sort of space jockey you want to be, from a humble space trader, to a pirate, to a soldier.

Great expansion. Eras, Golden Ages and Dark Ages add a lot of interest and depth to the mid and late game.

The new Civs are fine and well done.

Diplomacy still sucks and Civs still randomly declare wars they can't win for no reason. Still, much better than Vanilla.