Recent reviews by Blaine

When people warned that this game was buggy and unstable on PC, they sure weren't kidding.

At the moment, there's a known bug that's been around for months: The RDR2 executable sets its own app-specific volume slider in the Windows sound mixer extremely low. You therefore have to adjust the RDR2 volume slider up every single time you launch the game, unless you want to hear everything as a faint whisper.

Personally I have a G-Sync monitor and my games run far better in exclusive fullscreen mode. So, every single time I launch RDR2, I must navigate to the game settings, switch to windowed mode, increase the RDR2 volume mixer slider, then switch back to exclusive fullscreen mode.

Unfortunately, there is another known bug/instability issue that's been around for months: Changing graphics settings can cause the game to crash, or even BSOD. I've had two BSODs just from changing RDR2's graphics settings... the only two I've ever had on this rig. And I have no choice but to change them every time I launch the game due to the aforementioned volume slider bug.

My rig is more than powerful enough to run the game. When not crashing or otherwise bugging out, the game runs very smoothly and at 80-90 FPS for me on a mix of high/ultra settings. GPU and CPU temps and voltages stay within normal ranges.

I've refunded this game because if the developers are too incompetent to fix something as fundamental as CHANGING GRAPHICS SETTINGS without BSODing the computer, then despite how great the game itself is supposed to be, I'm not willing to risk throwing my money away on something that is borderline unplayable. Nor am I willing to spend dozens of hours trying tweaks, fixes, and .xml file edits to fix the game that may or may not actually help.

Finish the game, for God's sake. At this rate, I'll be dead before it's finished.

I played this for a few hours back in 2015, and it's now five years later.

I purchased Conan Exiles when it recently hit v1.0, and have played the game co-op with one friend on a private dedicated server. We had a lot of fun playing the game. Exploring the varied landscape of the world is very nice, the character customization and barbarian-themed armor and weapons are cool, building and decorating is interesting and satisfying, the climbing mechanics are really enjoyable, and it's a beautiful game to look at, too.

Ultimately though, I can't recommend it in its current state. Here's why:

The combat system, described by some reviewers as feeling nice and fluid, is afflicted by some serious issues, the most serious being shields. A player or NPC can keep his or her shield raised indefinitely, and the shield will totally negate the damage of almost any attack, high or low, with no loss of stamina. This is most obvious (and hilarious) when fighting frost giants. Their gigantic heavy axe attacks with huge windup animations simply stop dead upon contact with a player's shield, as if there's no weight or momentum behind them; you can stand around blocking all of their attacks until the shield eventually breaks, if so desired.

There is no hard counter to shields, whether being used by players or NPCs. You can perform a kick to unbalance your opponent, but they can recover and get the shield back up before you even escape the kick animation lock. You can't force them to drop their shield with heavy combos, since weapons rebound off shields, interrupting combos. You can't outflank them, because they can easily turn to face you, with lock-on in the case of player vs. player. All you can really do is move erratically and flail around like crazy hoping to get lucky hits in: essentially button-mashing.

In contrast to invincible shields with no counter, bows and ranged weapons come pre-nerfed, do terrible damage, and feature very low projectile velocity and exaggerated ballistic firing arcs, presumably because FunCom couldn't figure out how to balance ranged weapons properly. Fortunately, mods exist to at least un-nerf ranged weapon damage for solo play and on private servers, but unfortunately you'll be stuck with the silly flight physics that resemble throwing a tennis ball more so than firing an arrow.

Other issues with combat include huge quadrupedal bosses and enemies that turn on a dime, very poor telegraphing of some enemy attacks especially if your ping is higher than the single digits, and several other miscellaneous issues. It's also worth noting that boss hit points are massively inflated to be balanced around groups of 10+ players, so for solo and small-scale co-op you'll definitely need a mod.

Finally, you can avoid all combat, even PvP, simply by running away. Just keep on running and you'll be fine. Leopards can't catch you, for example, nor can a pack of wolves. Is an entire 10-man clan after you in PvP? Just run away, you'll be fine. If you think I'm kidding, Google it up, folks. The meta is real.

Conan Exiles has a serious problem with mob placement. For starters, enemies always spawn in the exact same spots, just like in an MMO (and also like an MMO, they're mostly there to guard resource nodes). Some wander a bit, but you will always know pretty much exactly where they'll be after you've visited an area one time. This applies to every creature and humanoid in the game. Compare to ARK: You may have a general idea of which dinosaurs are where, but they range over a huge area, and you never really know when or where a carnotaur or pack of allosaurs might appear. Compare to The Forest: Cannibals scout intelligently and patrol large areas unpredictably.

Creatures in Conan Exiles, for the most part, have no real ecosystem simulation (one exception: nest-guarding aggro), and their AI is very simplistic. They just stand around in their always-the-same spawn locations; the aggressive ones charge you headlong to attack when you enter their aggro radius, no matter what. None of them engage in threat displays to warn you off first, for example, as real-life gorillas might do.

Crocodiles are a special case. They stand around on land, charge headlong at their targets instead of laying in ambush, can't swim properly when they do go into the water, and can't even attack you if they're in the water with you. Yes, that's right: The crocodiles in Conan Exiles cannot swim properly or attack you in the water. Think about that for a second, folks.

Along the same lines, gorillas can't climb anything; big cats also can't climb (yes, a cat that can't climb) and as mentioned earlier, can't even manage to catch/deal damage to a running human. Spiders can't climb, either. Essentially, all NPCs/mobs can only move along the ground, and of the very few that can enter water, there isn't much meaningful they can do there. The big cats do sit around on Pride Rock lookalikes in some areas, though, which is a nice touch.

The store page makes a big deal about The Purge, a mechanic in which a horde of enemy NPCs appears to attack your base, but its implementation is extremely disappointing. You don't get to test out defensive walls, traps, palisades, boiling oil, flame orbs, and so on against a horde of enemies outside your gate when The Purge occurs. No, they just spawn anywhere on the foundation blocks of your base and attack your stuff and your thralls. This is exploitable, too, and also can be buggy.

There are no mounts or vehicles of any kind in Conan Exiles. For the most part, you will run or walk everywhere, constantly using up your stamina. For a game clearly in the same genre as ARK et al., this is very silly. I've heard a rumor that the developers claim the game engine "can't handle" fast mounts, and if that rumor is true, that is also silly since Conan Exiles is built with Unreal 4, which can handle vehicles just fine.

There is a limited fast travel device available to discover and build in one of the mid- to high-tier areas of the game, but it is limited to traveling from a huge and expensive placeable teleportation item to one of ten fixed points around the game world, one-way (unless you build more of that huge and expensive item nearby every fixed point).

Bugs are to be expected in this type of sandbox survival game, but some of the bugs currently present in Conan Exiles are really obnoxious. I pity anyone playing on a server where they don't have access to admin tools to work around bugs and other issues.

I'm not going to make an exhaustive list, but here's a good example: Named thralls (humans you can capture and enslave who have non-generic names) have goofy, super-far-apart alien eyes. Here, I'd better show you:

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1392018529

Yep, every single one of them.

Another bug that particularly annoyed us was items (including plot-essential quest items) seeming to vanish from the game files so completely that you can't even spawn them in with admin commands, let alone obtain them normally. This is usually blamed on mods by the community, but also occurs when no mods that touch items in any way are installed, or even with no mods at all.

This is a fun game, but it's plagued by some serious issues, including some very questionable design decisions that I doubt will ever be overhauled. I don't regret buying it or playing it, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it to any of my Steam friends in its current state. I wouldn't recommend ARK either, mind you, with ARK being the elephant in the current survival sandbox room.

It's hard to overstate what a magnificent exploration and adventure game Subnautica is.

What really stands out to me is that experience—not an XP bar, but the accumulation of knowledge about the game world, its locations, and its inhabitants—is the most powerful weapon in a player's arsenal.

Take Stalkers, for example: They're the first large predators a player will meet, and initially they're annoying and seem quite threatening. An experienced player will ignore them, though, or at most circle and poke them with a knife to make them go away, while at the same time stealing all of their scrap. It helps to have upgraded swim fins, upgraded O2, and other advantages, but if you took upgraded fins and O2 tanks away from experienced players, they still wouldn't have any issues with Stalkers.

There's a lot to find and a lot to do in this game. The need to unravel the game's central mysteries and to obtain blueprint fragments, salvage, and rare materials from wrecks, grottoes, and strange installations will force you to leave your comfort zone time and again. First you'll crawl out of the Safe Shallows, then you'll creep further and deeper, then you'll swim further still until one day you'll be amazed at how far away from Lifepod 5 you've gone, at the readout on your depth meter, and you'll wonder how you ever thought that the seaweed areas just outside of the Safe Shallows were in any way scary.

Sustenance is a challenge at first, and you'll scramble to get enough food and water, but later on they become a matter of management and planning ahead. If you're going on a long expedition, you'll want enough supplies to last for the duration, but not so many that you can't haul a goodly amount of salvage back to base.

As for fiddly stuff, you can spend hours building and customizing your underwater habitat, customize the look and module loadout of the various vehicles you can build (once you've got the complete blueprints and necessary materials), and have a lot of fun with the wide array of gadgets and Portal/Half-Life-style "techno-guns" the game has to offer. There's a lot of meat there, but the true meal lies in exploration.

Even at the very end of the game, though, armed with all the technology you've spent hours pulling out of wrecks and scanning (typically while watching your O2 meter like a hawk and listening nervously to that angry predator thrashing around outside), you'll never feel completely safe or at ease. There are great dangers lying in wait, and you'd better hope you spot them on your sonar before their sonar catches wind of you....

I bought JC3 during the recent Autumn Sale, and at first I was having a literal and figurative blast.

I have a beefy gaming rig, and the game played like a breeze for the first eight or ten hours at G-Synced 120+ FPS constant. It really was a smooth experience. Then the troubles began... but I'll get to the technical troubles in a minute.

I'll start with the actual game. JC3 is quite fun on the surface of it, and there are even more ways to get around and blow stuff up now, thanks to the wingsuit and retractable tethers. There's nothing quite like tethering two enemy soldiers and an explosive barrel to an attack chopper, reeling in, and watching as the unfortunate soldiers' flaming bodies blast off from the burning wreckage, which then hopefully crashes into some fuel tanks for even more destruction.

Those glorious moments are marred by steps backward from JC2, though. One thing to note is that Chaos points do absolutely nothing now except show huge numbers, even though they still appear every time you blow up a Chaos object. Upgrades are obtained by earning Gears for completing challenges. In my opinion, challenges should have been a separate reward track, and Chaos points still used for character progression.

In general, combat is now even more "cinematic" than in JC2, and often not in a good way. You can no longer sprint or dodge in JC3. With sprinting gone, the grapple basically must be used for absolutely everything mobility-related; otherwise, Rico is waddling around like a lame donkey. Dodging is gone, because every last semblance of tactics or strategy have been removed from combat. You're showered with bullets at all times (Rico is much more durable in JC3), and enemies simply respawn around you constantly.

Seriously, they'll respawn anywhere your camera isn't looking. If you for example clear all the enemies from a table of land that's sheer cliff on three sides, grapple away down the only path to that table of land, and then grapple back a few moments later, there'll be enemies there again. How did they get there? Did they turn invisible like the Predator and sprint past you? It's a mystery!

It's the same if you're flying an attack chopper. Have you taken out all the SAM sites, flak turrets, enemy choppers, and boats at a base without even scratching your paint? Doesn't matter, helicopters and boats will spawn nearby constantly until they manage to take you down when your attention is elsewhere.

Yet, at the same time, fights are very easy.

Now, onto the vehicle controls that also helped usher in my technical difficulties. The vehicle controls are bad, but motorcycles take the cake. Even riding at moderate speeds (or low speeds, or high speeds), motorcycles either barely turn at all, or they whip around 90-180 degrees in the blink of an eye.

To try to improve the experience, I plugged in a standard Xbox One controller (which takes an eternity to be recognized by Just Cause 3, causes weird lag on every load, and can also crash the game). With a controller, the motorcycle was very slightly easier to control, but not by much. It still either barely turned or whipped around frenetically, whether I was tilting the stick a little or a lot. This isn't realistic, as some fans of the game claim. I've ridden motorcycles and dirt bikes in real life, and I play proper racing simulators too. Funny, the real thing and the simulated things don't control like hot garbage.

The automobile controls are much better, especially if you've got an agile sports or race car. The helicopter controls are easy; the plane controls are terrible. If they were going for a realistic feeling, they failed and ended up with garbage controls instead. In general, expect to be frustrated by the vehicle controls.

Now, after I started using the controller for vehicles, the frequency of crashes and hanging on load increased tremendously, and that's what eventually caused me to quit the game before finishing it. Seriously, this is a console port that can't even support a standard Microsoft gamepad properly! It would be funny if it weren't so obnoxious. This is a well-known issue and, no, it still hasn't been fixed.

Speaking of things that haven't been fixed, there are longstanding issues in JC3 that Avalanche never bothered to fix, For example, in the town of Surpicco, once you've destroyed all the Chaos objects and have done everything but capture the police station and fill the "Wreak Havoc" meter, enemies stop spawning prematurely. You have to leave the police station, go to a different town, get heat, go back to Surpicco, and then lure the enemies near/into the station before killing them in order to fill the Havoc meter. Yep, it's as annoying as it sounds, well-known issue, they never bothered to fix it.

So in summary, it's a real shame, but avoid this game. It tries hard to be good, and it almost is good, but there are so many backsteps and frustrations that it's just not worth it.

Brigador looks like a fairly straightforward action game at first glance, but it isn't. You can't simply rush in like an idiot stomping and shooting everything. Past the very first babby missions, you must develop situational awareness, tread carefully (e.g., don't back into a gas station while aiming across the map), take facing into account (flanks and rear = more damage), take terrain and map layout into account (and use it against enemies where possible), manage sound because it attracts the attention of enemies (an exploding space cannon makes a great deal of noise; firing a quiet weapon, very little), prioritize targets, conserve your ammo, aim carefully, and use your special equipment wisely.

There's quite a learning curve at first. Learning to steer and aim simultaneously takes some getting used to, as does figuring out the flow of the game and what does what. One mistake can get you blown up or swarmed and botch an entire mission.

The maps and terrain are quite varied, from landscaped suburban housing enclaves to open fields to neon-bedecked cities to pipe- and factory-filled industrial zones. The faction and unit composition of the enemy force also differs and makes for markedly differently play, especially during the campaign.

There are currently 52 vehicles to choose from, more-or-less evenly split between mechs, tanks, and agravs (hover vehicles), and further split between three factions. Their attributes and handling vary widely, and many have special traits; even their profile can have an effect (needle-like vehicles are harder to hit head-on, for example). The smaller, frailer vehicles cost more to unlock and are harder to play but grant reward multipliers at mission end. There are 40 weapons split between five hardpoint categories and 4 pieces of special equipment (smokescreen, EMP grenade, optic camo, and demolition blast). These can be mixed and matched however you see fit, although the type of hardpoints (each vehicle has two) are fixed. These options allow for a great deal of flexibility and variety.

Most of the unlocks after vehicles and equipment are for progressively longer and harder Freelance campaigns, and for pilots. Higher-level pilots increase mission difficulty and payout, and cost progressively more to unlock. There are also a bunch of Intel/Lore items to unlock that offer a lot of backstory for the game.

The game's almost purely skill-based. Taking a frail vehicle piloted by a high-difficulty pilot through a long, high-difficulty Freelance campaign is possible, but requires a great deal of practice and familiarity with the game.

A mech simulator it ain't, but it is a beautiful, detailed, well-made game that requires a lot more than mindless button-mashing and features hard (potentially EXTREMELY hard), but fair, difficulty.