Recent reviews by Molotov Milkshake

Kenshi is a hard game to describe, but it has some key similarities to Mount and Blade: you make your own story in an organic sandbox world, which is quite happy to exist without you. You recruit soldiers, build armies, try to become powerful. However, the big difference between Kenshi and M&B is the combat, which functions as an RTS/RPG hybrid, rather than the player skill-based action of M&B. Combat happens entirely in the surreal Dali-esque overworld.

It's a brutal, punishing game with a steep learning curve. But it's also really fun and scratches that same itch that Mount and Blade does. There is also quite a bit more depth here with the sort of things you can achieve and the actions you can take, for example: being able to build settlements, mining materials etc.

Of course there is ancient lore to discover etc, but your player character's story is yours to create. You can be a lone warrior, a warlord, a merchant, a criminal, a slave/prisoner and so on. If you're the sort of person who enjoys the free-form style of Mount and Blade, you'll likely enjoy Kenshi and find it a refreshing change. If you're the sort of person who needs a clear narrative and exposition to enjoy a game, you won't like Kenshi.

I really don't understand the hate for this game. It's easily the best Mount and Blade game yet.

If you're cool with making your own adventure in a dynamic world, then you'll be happy.

Also, all the NPCs look really happy, so it must be good.

Standard Asian MMO garbage, but with added Chinese spyware. Literally added weird start-up scripts called 'AF_counter_2XXXXX' etc. This app cannot be trusted. Even after uninstalling and removing the startup apps + registry entries, the game folder still left 1.7GB of files on my disk.

Also, the game itself sucks.

Amazing pinball game, but needs more than 1 table. I know XenoTilt is a thing, but this dev should take lessons from Pinball FX3.

It's the only true pinball simulator with the actual licenses and other mad crossovers via Steam etc.

I recommend the Portal table because it's awesome, but most are too.

Finally, Reptoid Strike.

--Review-in-progress. More to be added when I complete the game-- TL:DR: If you love Suikoden 1 and 2, then this game is for you. If you dislike those games, you'll dislike this. If you haven't played those games, then you should do so before considering Eiyuden.

Be aware that a bunch of right-wing crybabies and incels are brigading the game/devs right now because some 'gamergate' incel types have been raging about it on Twitter and YouTube, and it's become the latest target for the X brigade's war on 'wokeness' (lol). The localisation is fine. The hysterics from incels is peak cringe (I've literally seen them claiming the localisation is "evil" on the Steam forum lmao). Anyone saying they need a 'direct translation' is simply being disingenuous, and anyone who knows anything about Japanese language will know that direct translations don't work. As we all know at this point: when someone complains about "wokeness" they are just trolls and/or dysfunctional people. These people have tried to review bomb the game, which is why I'm putting up a review-in-progress.

With that out of the way, this feels like a true successor to Suikoden 1 and 2, moreso than Suikoden 3-5 did (and I love those latter games too). Visually splendid, gorgeous sprite work, tons of charm, with modern sensibilities. The 3D environments look lovely (which is very rare for a JRPG), even the dungeons look nice and are interestingly designed. Tons of characters, tons of secrets, plenty going on, Lots to explore. I'm only 13 hours in and I'm having a blast so far building up my army and castle, and am yet to see anything remotely 'woke' here (besides the typical Suikoden story about building and uniting a diverse army in resistance against a corrupt empire, of course).

If you haven't played Suikoden, then you should play those games (1 and 2 at the very least), which will give you an idea if Eiyuden is for you.

Remember in FF7 when you killed destiny itself and Sephiroth was a time traveller who harrassed Cloud constantly? Remember when FF7 ended as you left Midgar?

Yeah, me neither.

This is fanfiction tier garbage. And the story gets even more ridiculous than my opening sentence.

They took the first few hours of FF7 and pumped it full of filler content, barely any of which adds anything worthwhile. Everything is bloat. To call this game 'Remake' is completely misleading. Not only does it only contain essentially the intro section of FF7, but it deviates so far from the original in terms of story and pacing. It holds almost none of the charm of the original game. Combat feels like a slightly improved Crisis Core (I hate that trash game).

Credit where credit is due though: The music is amazing. The visuals are great. Some of the additional characterisation + acting is very nice (Barrett is MVP here). And the boss fights are fun. Those are the only praises I can give this game.

Square, you NEED to keep Nomura away from EVERYTHING. Do not let him out of his box again.

Me: "Can we buy Left 4 Dead?"
Mom: "We have a Left 4 Dead at home."
The Left 4 Dead at home:

There's really no excuse for how garbage this game is. They produced a trash rip-off of Left 4 Dead, then they tacked on a ton of bloat (shopping, deck-building, character and weapon customisation etc) which wrecks the pacing, the characters and writing have no charm/heart and no banter, the special infected are all extremely lame compared to Left 4 Dead. The levels are not memorable or interesting. Tons of stupid mechanics like birds alerting the horde, despite that gunshots don't. Zombies running around the birds and not scaring them.

Here's an idea: if you're going to repeatedly mention Left 4 Dead in your marketing, and claim you are making a L4D successor, you better make sure you IMPROVE upon it, or at least make sure to capture what was great about L4D. Here's another idea: adding bloat is not improving something. Here's another idea: try to make your gameplay mechanics MAKE SENSE in terms of the story and setting. Hearing characters telling me to collect cards to be stronger is just bizarre for an FPS survival shooter. This isn't a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ card game. It's BLOAT, and there's no good reason for me to have to equip 10 cards which give me +10 this stat or +15 that stat. It's tedious to deal with.

Just play L4D, as it's vastly superior to this utter joke of a game. Far cheaper too, and contains none of the stupid crap. Oh, and L4D is actually fun, unlike this.

Before anyone cries about my time played: I played a lot in the beta, and the game still sucks just as much. Even worse in some ways.

This game failed to hook me in the first 2 hours. The game looks pretty and the voice acting/writing is pretty decent. However, it feels very unpolished and shallow. Glitches and graphical bugs galore, right from the start.

I didn't bother wasting time in character creation, and just picked the first monster the game randomly generated generated for me. I wanted to spend my first 2 hours playing the actual game. I picked my stats, and jumped right in.

Turns out about 90% of those first 2 hours was spent listening to people talk and pretending my choices in conversations meant something. The first time I came across a 'meaningful' choice resulted in an instant death if I picked the 'alternative', which as far as I'm concerned, is not a choice. When I wasn't being forced to listen to cut-scenes, I was being bombarded with phone calls from multiple different characters as I travelled between locations. The game feels like style over substance: sensory and information overload, without any sense of pacing. Kind of feels like the 'White Noise' of video games in that regard, especially given how extremely vibrant the world looks. This amplifies the feeling even more. The game simply would not chill out for a minute and allow me to take in the world, which is the main attraction in this game. The moment I hit the streets I had like 4 different people calling me and telling me to go somewhere and do something.

I managed to experience the first 3 action sections: rescuing the woman from the apartment, the very boring on-rails car chase, and taking the Flathead drone from Maelstrom. These were over within a few minutes each. I was pretty shocked that I didn't get further than this in 2 hours of playing, and I even skipped through quite a bit of the dialogue (since I've already seen/heard it in videos/streams etc). The shooting felt okay I suppose, but it suffered from that typical FPS/RPG jank present in most similar games that try to straddle both genres: pistols and rifles feel weak, enemies feel extremely armoured (I get that this fits the lore since people have sub-dermal armour etc in this world, but that doesn't explain why guns are so pitifully weak. You'd think they'd have invented some more effective weaponry in a world where cyborgs exist, like why doesn't everyone just use armour-piercing ammo?), and I had the most fun rushing up to enemies and using the shotgun, which felt far more effective than the other weapons. The hacking is also pretty cool, and allows you to turn the various objects cluttering the areas into weapons, or interfere with enemies more directly. I can see the actual combat getting better as the game progresses and you unlock new abilities, but there's so little of it! As I said previously, around 80% (or more) of my time in-game was spent in conversations and the action was short-lived. That's just bad pacing. It's a real shame because CDPR finally managed to make combat kinda enjoyable in one of their games (a huge achievement for them...).

Of course, the combat is not my gripe with this game. It's the endless talking. It feels more like a film or TV series than a video game, which is then brought down horribly by all the constant graphical bugs. Within the first 5 minutes of starting the game all the NPCs were skating around in T-poses with their heads missing. I then got dragged into a long conversation with Dexter Deshawn, whose lips were not moving at all during his speech. Then during the Maelstrom factory action sequence, I was constantly getting stuck/caught on random boxes and objects that were cluttering the area. Animations such as climbing ladders look janky and badly designed, and the game is just full of little things that ultimately cheapen the experience. This game distinctly lacks polish in so many ways. Once I was allowed onto the streets I started massacring civilians just for a laugh and faced absolutely no consequences and nobody cared. The cops didn't even come after me or anything. It's very strange. Night City feels more like a sandbox than an immersive sim world.

In the first 2 hours I saw RPG elements were skin-deep and mostly don't impact anything at all. And when they do have an impact, it's usually something like being instantly killed and having to reload. At best one of your attributes or origin choice will allow you to get a little bit more information or a small reward, but that's it. Again, this is not 'choice' in any meaningful sense. It's the game's way of forcing you to play a certain way. It's an illusion of choice.

Maybe it makes a good TV show/movie, but that is not what I play video games for. I'd argue the move towards games being more cinematic and less gameplay-focused is exactly the problem with the AAA games industry. The difference with CP2077 is that it's horribly unpolished and janky compared to most AAA releases. I want to play a game that engages me, and if I spent 80% of my time not pressing any buttons, that's a problem.

So far I have not been impressed with anything CDPR have put out, and CP2077 is more of the same: amateurish and unpolished. However, it is a definite massive improvement over their previous works, I will give them that.

I paid £24.99 for the game, and when the 2 hours mark arrived, I knew this purchase was a mistake. Thank Steam for the refund.