Recent reviews by [SuA] Godverdomme

I've now completed 2 full playthroughs, and have over 200 hours in the game. I have to say, I like it. Anyone peripherally following the Cyberpunk 2077 launch obviously has heard of the bugs. AI causing cars to randomly crash and explode. Items not spawning or despawning randomly. Items randomly falling or flying off when opening a container. Jumping 10cm can sometimes kill you on landing. Some loot is just unlootable. Those are all real things that can still occur in the current patch (1.22), and you need to be aware of them before you take the plunge. However, the game does offer a lot of good things:
- The setting is great. Cyberpunk's dystopian world is just amazing & deep. If you're into lore and background info, the rabbit hole you can go down is insanely deep.
- The story is interesting, and the characters used have solid distinct personalities. It is all presented in a way which suits the dystopian setting well.
- The game allows you a fair amount of ways to play it. You have different playstyles, different combat approaches, etc. That said, I often get bogged down into one way of playing (being sneaky stealthy hacker).
- It often looks visually stunning, while performance is perfectly acceptable for me at 1440p with most on high, with RTX off. Only population density had to be kept at medium due to having a fairly old i7-7700k.

But even if I am a fan of this game, there are some severe let downs that I wish they would fix. Some of them don't even require a whole lot of work.
- The world is fairly stale and unreactive, because your actions have little to no impact. For instance, what you wear has no impact. While the game allows you to dress like punk street trash, and as a high class corpo, nowhere in game is this really taken into account. Posh wine bars will still call you scum from Watson, even if you're dressed in the most expensive corpo suits. In the same fashion, the reaction of gangs to your presence is generally unchanged, even if you're known for wholesale slaughtering their friends. Only in a few scripted quest events, there are some reactions to your behavior.
- The gangs in the Cyberpunk world are supposed to be very diverse. And they sure look the part, with each their own distinctive look and voice lines. However, with the NCPD scanner jobs and gigs, it is pretty much revealed that they all act the same way. They all take part in the same criminal behavior. I would really like to see some differences there to add flavor to the world. Maybe it allows you to feel more sympathy for some gangs, and hate for others? That said, all gangs are obviously "bad" in their own way, so even if you liked some, your morals would still be challenged in what you deem acceptable behavior.
- Car AI is horrendous. Quite often cars crash during scripted dialogues and whatnot. It's not rare to see run down lighting poles and traffic lights all over the city. The city also has no motorcycles on the road, while you can find them parked almost anywhere. I assume that's because the driving AI is so attrocious.
- While the graphic design is often on point, sometimes it's clearly not well integrated together. A good example is the fact that during slow-motion your screen has a color shift. That's a nice effect, except that it makes almost all red dots in game almost unusable in certain lighting conditions?
- The game has a fairly large selection of clothes to sample during your playthrough, but sadly it is very unlikely that you'll be able to stick to the type of style which you prefer for your character. The ability to find the right gear is fairly limited, and largely depends on luck. There are many stores, but most serve a limited style. And them spawning the gear you wish to have with decent stats is a rare occurrence. Finding stuff from drops is very happy-go-lucky. I suspect most gamers will only have seen a tiny fraction of the options this game has to offer.
- In similar vain to the clothing styles above, weapons and cars are also limited in choices. Skins and coloring cannot be changed, even if the world is fully of examples that are colored differently. Your corpo might be stuck with a bright pink shotgun promoting the local strip club. Or your nomad might be forced to use a gun with the logo of a rival gang. There is no costumization for looks of a car or weapon. That's a shame, because all the assets are already in-game.

Overall, I'd say that The Witcher 3 succeeded better at creating an cohesive and immersive world, even if its scope was more limited. But Cyberpunk 2077 is more than worth a try (if your PC can handle running it).

This game had kinda slipped past me at release and I found it now on Steam sale. While the game is largely about its twitchy combat, I'd say that the actual strength of the game lies in its art style and assets. I was pretty blown away by it. The game is short, so I would recommend getting it on sale (or at a future low price) but it is certainly worth playing.

I hope that the next game this studio makes has more RPG elements and some more in depth world building. It doesn't need to be very complex, but I think the game would benefit from branching dialogue and a tiny bit of choice & consequence.

Initially, I wasn't very impressed by the game:
- The engine not behaving like the original game due to its physics implementation. Knock on a crate & sometimes the much heavier & bigger crate behind it goes flying off. Also stuff like the ladders didn't always work as intended.
- The Marine AI was also underwhelming. If you sneak up on an oblivious marine, he will ALWAYS know you're there if you sneak too close. Won't turn around to check as if he heard something, no, he'll immediately react as if you've already been seen.
- The sound taunts are often utterly out of place. Playing out of sequence or even playing before anyone has spotted you.

Up to halfway, I was a bit underwhelmed. It was prettier than the original and a nice nostalgia trip, but that's about it. But then came Xen. Xen is absolutely visually stunning and the levels are well designed. My only irritation in Xen is one of the magically invulnerable bosses, which you can waste ammo on, but you can't hurt it initially for a quite long time. The game doesn't really make that clear at all.

But for Xen alone this game is worth playing for a Half-Life fan.

While the idea behind this game appears to be great, I can't help but feel it falls short. The setting & story are good, and the gameplay passable, but it feels very much like the game was purposefully lengthened with meaningless filler combat. Once a few hours in, there is very little evolution left and it bores rather quickly.
That said, I was more of less expecting an FTL with different story & setting, so that's some pretty high expectations.

I put off picking up ATOM RPG for quite a while, because I heard that it was quite long and I was somewhat skeptical about the quality of it. But boy, was I wrong. The game is most certainly worth the price it's going for now and aside from a slow start (for me at least), the game just drags you along for a wild ride.
The game may not have choice & consequence to the degree that Fallout 1 & 2 did, but they clearly tried. The visual side of things seems to be better put together than Wasteland 2 and is just more coherent. The story could've used some more polishing, but that may also be because I've played the english translation. I was initially also a bit taken aback by the inclusion of so many cultural references (from W40k to pizzagate) and was afraid that it would ruin immersion, but in the end it did complement the environment to some degree.

If you like RPGs with turnbased combat, I'd strongly recommend picking this game up.

I really wanted to like this game, but it utterly fails in two major respects:
1) It's purely console oriented. From the fight style to the dialogue selection, the developers made no effort to take advantage of PC capabilities. The combat is "lock on" centric and the dialogue selection let you guess at what the developers actually meant.
2) Suspension of disbelief goes out the window quickly, as the game lacks any kind of internal consistency. The game allows you to go off the beaten path, but utterly fails to take into account that you can. Meaning you can solve quests and get the reward for it, before you even know it was a quest and subsequently having people talk to you as if it hasn't been resolved already because you never formally received the quest. You can so get tons of information from the game world, but the game doesn't take that into account at all in dialogues which leads to utterly retarded situations. It also severely contradicts itself multiple times within a single conversation.

Though I realize it is unlikely to happen, I was hoping for a mix of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines with The Witcher 3, but it never came anywhere close. Which really is too bad, since the game did have potential.

Brutally unforgiving and endlessly frustrating, but extremely enjoyable and novel in its concept. I only hope to see more games going off the beaten path like this one has.

Still in early access so not everything is implemented yet, but it seems clear that Tannenberg will be as good as (if not better than) Verdun.
The larger maps require a significantly more tactical approach and the weather effects have significant impact on how the map is perceived/played.
Hopefully the Verdun community will jump on this one as well.

Pleasantly surprised by this game.
The combat/shooting system can be a bit awkward, and every once in a while you notice that the devs were not native english speakers, but overall a nicely polished game.
The story is solid and the endgame choices actually feel worthwhile.
Certainly would recommend for the price, especially with it on sale right now.

Had lots of potential, but fails to live up to the hype.

Single player:
- The games idea of difficulty or progression is "more". Just throw more units at you, that makes it more interesting, right? Well, no, it doesn't. There's really very little finesse or tactics in this game in single player.
- Weapon choices become damn restrictive. If you found a weapon you liked, chances are you will have no chance to keep using it, because the end is just endless swarms of tougher units. Easiest way is to swap your librarian to melee weapons. But that severely restricts gameplay options.
- Story breaks suspension of disbelief many times. It feels more like something hastefully scribbled onto a napkin and they forgot to flesh it out.
- Team mate AI is dumber than a bag of bricks. Let's turn our backs to obviously approaching xenos, hold fire and wait because your team lead walked forward to face some enemies on the other end. Oh, your back got scratched open? Unexpected. I suspect that the Codex Astrates says something about "face your enemy" somewhere.
- Some stuck units (in the environment) and pathing issues, including your teammates.
- Very annoying flickering lights sometimes, which were clearly not intended. But otherwise no big technical issues for me.
- The ending cinematic is insulting and unfulfilling. Boom, "the end", here's the menu. Scrolling text or voice over would've been better than this.

Multiplayer:
- If you play it seriously, with a decent team and even at highest difficulty, I've found it rather easy if you take your time while progressing slowly. Easy, until you meet something like a Scythe or Broodlord & then you get your ♥♥♥♥ kicked in. Didn't play much father than that since teams tend to disintegrate as people leave.
- Lots of connection errors when joining games.
- Most players I've played with seem frustrated and/or clueless.
- Loading screens, death screens and "vote" screens (reset/continue) after death don't allow any chat communication with your other team mates. Why the hell not?

Would not recommend it, not even to a huge W40k fan. It just doesn't have worthwhile content. The only thing I could recommend it for, is sightseeing. The interior of the Space Hulk is damn beautiful, I'll give them that.