Recent reviews by ZoneAnomaly

Very good game. A very good story with a humorous and pretty likable main character. An immersive, living world where you can get up to all sorts of trouble, from gambling and drinking to "accidentally" sticking your fingers in the pockets of the local armorsmiths for their "access every chest" key and then robbing them for all they're worth in the middle of the night.

However, I may or may not currently have a bounty that's about equal value to the GDP of Bohemia. Sometimes, you have to have shiny things. Sometimes, you have to swipe 500k groschen worth of shiny things out of the hands of your neighbors. For several weeks on end. I don't make the rules, okay? I just break them.

I would give this game a positive review, but I have to wait until the Fun Pimps decide I can, because that might be an exploit. After all, they work so hard, they know what's best for all of us. They understand fun. It's in their name.

Utterly fantastic, atmospheric first person survival games. Despite feeling a bit crusty for their age, with some esoteric game design to get around, the STALKER series is nonetheless absolutely masterclass in tone, exploration, and setting. And your experience can be enhanced even more with it's surprising amount of mod-ability. The community is pretty robust and very talented, with some really really great mods having helped extend this trilogy's lifespan and shoot the replay-ability through the roof.
I'm biased. I've always had a soft spot for anything Soviet-era. Not the regime, mind you, but the aesthetic, the artwork, even the Russian language itself is very pretty. It's why Metro sits at the top of my gaming experiences, it's why I'm always on the lookout for more of these kinds of things, it's why I always want to prop up good Eastern European devs, and it's why I always find my way back to Sidorovich's camp, or the 100 Rads Bar. The stalker can leave the Zone, but the Zone can never leave the stalker.

So yeah, I recommend this game, and by extension all three.

Utterly disappointed with this Beta. Couldn't get in past the Hub before getting disconnected and booted back to the Character screen, and I sat for hours trying. Can't even tell you how the game plays other than the tutorial. So thanks, Fatshark servers. l didn't want to try out a new Warhammer game early anyways.

At least the screen blurbs were kind of neat.

Art is dead. This game winning as many awards despite literally everything sucking is baffling, but you know what? ♥♥♥♥ it. I wanna piss someone off.

Life Is Strange is what happens when you let 40-year old morons who haven't been anywhere near a teenager(probably a good thing though) in the last 30 years. It has everything a modern "Choose Your Own Adventure" needs: A bad plot with poorly defined time powers. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful annoying sidekick who whines about every little thing you do if it doesn't further her personal interests. And "choices" that don't actually matter all that much. Minus the choice to kill Chloe. Easiest pick of my life.

And that brings me to Chloe. Probably the most unbearable person I've ever had the displeasure of knowing. Throughout the game, she'll use Max's time travel powers as a crutch to avoid any actual consequences. Shooting herself with a gun because she was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid and irresponsible? "Wahhhh Max I hurt myself, please revert it because I don't wanna learn", even though Max using her powers adversely affects her. When Max wants to console a hurting friend with a call, she rides your ass about it because a mental health crisis isn't as important as ME ME ME! She's an absolute prick to everyone who doesn't prioritize her, and by the end "Kill Chloe" wasn't so much a choice as a necessity.

The writing is a hoot and a holler. Either someone plugged in "What cool lingo do the kids use" and fed the results to an AI, or some intern was paid 6 bucks an hour to write something while he was cleaning the toilets, because it is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful. Every character is so awful to listen to talk that I started either skipping over the talking or spaced out entirely. It's like they picked a bunch of stereotypes and said "Yeah, those can be our characters".

Whoever was behind the animation, fantastic job. I have never seen anyone recreate Half-Life 1's lip flapping to simulate talking since Valve released the game in 2000. I was not expecting a small French studio in 2014 to have graphics on the level of GTA, but at least they could have bothered to try. Has anyone in Arcadia raised their eyebrows before? Given anything more than a scowl or a smile?

What about story? Honestly, you could play to the part in the first episode where Nate *almost* (should have gone through with it, wimp) shoots Chloe, and you'd get a good gauge for how pointless it is when you realize that the ending is literally 2 binary choices that, realistically, aren't even comparable in scale.
That "choices matter" tag has always been a load of ♥♥♥♥ with these types of games. What makes choices in well written games so effective is the subtlety in both how they are introduced and the comparable scale of importance in both choices. Eating a sandwich or eating a hamburger is much more comparable choice to, say, destroying a whole town and killing countless residents for a piece of ♥♥♥♥ person, or letting said piece of ♥♥♥♥ die, which solves every problem all of a sudden. Go figure.

I know, despite my very sunny optimistic disposition, I can be pretty negative sometimes. So let's offset those 'bad vibes' with what I liked:
Kate Marsh

Life Is Strange is baffling. It's such a mediocre game that people raved about. I know why they did, and I'm not going to say why here in the interest of civility. Don't waste the hard drive space on this, and definitely don't encourage them to continue making this ♥♥♥♥ by giving them your money. Buy an actual game with that cash.

3/10

For a dollar, you could do a whole lot worse, in all honesty. There's a decent amount of levels, despite how samey they all are, and you get haha funny troll face to really PRANK your pals on Steam. Feels a bit 2010, but I'm not expecting to put hundreds of hours into this game like I do with some games.

An ultra-post modernist nightmare hellscape inhabited by weaboos, idiots, perverts, and an embarassing lack of pants or tasteful clothing. If this is the metaverse of the future, then no wonder the technology is so widely rebuked. Do yourself a favor and don't waste any time on it

Probably the worst expansion of D2's lifecycle. It really did nothing to advance the sandbox in a good way, instead allowing for Bungie to rip even more money out of their paying customers by introducing Season Passes and essentially capitalizing on FOMO to an even heavier extent. The story was cool, but not "25 dollars" cool, and The Moon is neat to look at, but feels lackluster even comparing to BL. And one day it'll probably get removed to "make space for new content".
Destiny 2 is a great game at it's core, but it's held down by the fact that it's being created from a greedy studio. And I'm just as complicit in it as everyone else. Don't bother buying this ♥♥♥♥, it's really not worth the money

If you pick up the Definitive Edition, the booba is a nice little addition, but go buy something from the Taco Bell dollar menu instead of wasting that money on what's essentially another skin for your female soldiers

A digital fox family made me feel more loved, appreciated, and respected than my real family has in the last 5 years.

Definitely worth the money