Recent reviews by Tomarch

PLAY IT

The best shooter I know and the first game apart from Minecraft that got me into gaming around 7 years ago. I bought it a second time on Steam just to be able to leave a review and animate people to play it. I really want it to survive!

Currently, if you're European, you should always find enough people to play, although there aren't many left sadly. Please do not miss out on this phenomenal experience - it is fast, tight, balanced and has a ton of community-content including classic modes like insta-gib, king of the hill, infection,... However, there are a ton of original ones as well, like obstacle, which really puts your precision to test and essentially creates a parkour-game-experience. All of these take place on a huge variety of maps made by either the devs or (mostly) the community.

It would be a shame to see this game die off completely, please support it - it's worth it.

One of the best online FPS experiences ever, with a never-dying (EU) playerbase.

Can't recommend it enough, it has some dated movement, but after some time you won't notice it at all.
Vietnam-DLC is still one of the best ever in my opinion.

Coop works again.

Narratively extremely well done and interesting comment on the current state of the gaming industry woven into a personal, yet intruiging story.

Wonderful game that starts crazy, proceeds strange and then takes a turn and becomes absolutely insane, a ride from start to finish!

This is such a mess in the best way possible.

The humor is golden, the plot is absolutely ridiculous and keeps on giving, starting small and expanding exponentially + the ending is phenomenal!

There are some bugs, it crashed once, the controls are clunky with a lot of fetching stuff and the writing is kinda repetitive, but still, this was one hell of a fun time and I think you should absolutely play it if you like weird stuff and 80s trash humor (British one especially).

I hope the devs please us with another one of these.

Probably the most incredible gaming experience I've ever had.
This is proof that video games are an art form that can deliver extremely important messages in a way nothing else can. I really felt like I became part of the story, it opened my eyes in many ways and left me inspired, exactly what art should do in my opinion.

Please support the devs, they deserve every bit of praise for this personal experience.

The best strategic experience ever created!

And they keep on making it better or at least different all the time, making it a must play for me, even though I'm not that much of a strategic-games-guy at all.

This is without question the best racing game I've ever played!

Jumping into an enemy driver and smashing them out of the track, then using nitro to regain speed to continue in the absolutely insane race or crashing someone so hard their car explodes sending their driver through the windshield - it just never gets old. But not just that, it's the driving, the tracks, the stunt-races, the demolition-derbies, this game is PACKED with content easily worth 20-30 hours a playthrough (I just completed the main-campaign with first place on every race and got 21h out of it, a number I definitely intend to get higher) and all that for 2€ when it's on sale? I don't even have to think about it!

But what about the handling and feeling and things racing games need to have? Well I'm not too much into the genre and you should definitely not expect a Forza game, but it never intended to be one either. For me personally, it can't get better than this! It can get frustrating at times when you're trying to get past that one AI for the Fifth time, but these challenges make the game interesting and keep you playing.

So to keep this a little bit shorter: If your favourite thing in racing-games is ramming and taking your opponents out or simply not caring and making your way to first place no matter the casualties, this is the holy grail of racing games for you and believe me when I say it has aged extremely well - it's still one of those games that are being played on every single LAN-party I go to!

9

This is a tough one for me! (Tl;dr at the bottom)

The first Dishonored (Which will be refered to as D1 most of the time in this review) is my favourite game so I just had to have D2 and although I read all the bad reviews about the terrible optimization, I decided to buy it, praying in my sleep that it would work. Turns out it works perfectly well on my one year old GTX-980M-Laptop, Nearly-everything on Ultra and 50-80 FPS most of the time, I was happy like a little kid who got all the worlds sweets.

In the end I prefer D1 still, however, D2 is by no means a bad game, it just couldnt quite live up to my, fairly high, expectations. But if you see it at its own, it's still a masterpiece (at least gameplay-wise).


Being able to choose from two characters has given this game a great variety and much more room for experimentation, the New Game + feature is great and makes a bit of a sandbox out of everything, there are many ways to kill in D2!

The gameplay is just as perfectly done as the first parts is, with a lot more options for both lethal and non-lethal players.
I cant really say much about the fighting mechanics tho, as I'm currently in my first high-chaos-mayhem run (just running and killing everyone on sight, while furiously repeating to smash r=healing potion (I know this is not the way this game is meant to be played, but I just wanted to try it). But from what I've seen I dont really like the odd feedback of the dagger, something is different than in the first game, but like many things about D2, I cant quite put my finger on it, it just feels off.

Stealth-gameplay is still a blast! this is where this series shines, obviously, as there are so many, not too overpowered, yet interesting powers in the game. Emily's are especially intruiging, as we havent seen them before. I won't spoil them, but you'll love it!

A small tip, play on hard on the first run, the other difficulties are a joke to me, except if you dont seek for a bit of a challenge. You can also build your own difficulty with alot of options to modify however you want it, havent seen that before and I freaking love it!


WOW! They have done it again!
This has been crafted perfectly, Karnaca never failed to amaze me with an extreme variity of sidewalks, balconies, gorgeous scenery and all kinds of ways to get to your destination. Arkane has delivered such a great job here, I'd even dare saying the many options to solve the case are richer and better here than in D1, where it was top-notch already!
The only points that were a bit worse here somehow is immersion, which was done better in D1 in my opinion (you just don't feel like being pulled in that much) and the difficulty of the missions. In the first game it felt like it became gradually more difficult, here its a mess, as it varies way too much from one to the next level.
The design is well-thought-through, the 9 parts feal alive with many npc buzzing around and nothing has been recycled from the first one, except for one thing I won't tell you, which was reused for reasons!
And like somebody stated in another Review already, bloodflies are freaking terrifying!


This is where D2 falls flat on its face, you do not care about anybody or anything in this game, except maybe a little tiny bit about Sokolov . The voice acting is done without really much heart and Corvo showed more emotion in D1, it just feels "off" and isn't really there for a reason. Delilah's an empty hull with 100% clichee-intentions.
If you seek memorable characters like Daud, go play the first one again!
The story is linear and there is nothing surprising, engaging or motivating about it. I'd even dare saying it's ridiculous, as Delilah simply walks in, demands the throne and SUDDENLY everybody who has been with Corvo and Emily for over a decade hates an wants to kill them.. WHAT?


Well, although I liked that better in the first one, there are some great, immersive, little songs to hear in Karnaca'S backstreets, which were the icing on top!
But except for that theres nothing really worth mentioning, it wasnt too bad but I won't remember anything about it in a week.


I'll still be playing this for some time and I might update if new thoughts come up, but so far I'd say it's worth the 20€ sale-price, but if you haven't played the first installment, please do yourself a favour, buy and play it! it's well worth your time! I'm somebody you'd call a patient gamer, I never pay full price so saying it's worth 20€ might equal your "buy-at-full-price".

Tl;dr: It's more of the same, which is great in my opinion, but don't expect more, the story could have been left out entirely, but the gameplay and world/level-building is just as great as ever!

7

I think I'm just the wrong person for DS, as it clearly is not a bad game.

It's just the legendary, brutal difficulty and (way worse for me personally) the controls on PC, it's just frustrating. In my opinion games should only frustrate til the frustration changes into anger, to be followed by pure rage. DS didn't just jump over the edge, but fell down laughing and yelling.

Then there's the save system that I didn't really need, why can't you just save like in every other game, it seems like being hard is the only thing DS wants to accomplish, I find stories/gameplay/motivating quests a bit more important than trying not to die in RPG's, but that's just me.

So I why don't I give it a thumbs down if I obviously didn't like it?
Well, on the one hand there's the bad Controls and such, but the main issue in this case is me. I think for the right people this is a great game, it just happens that I'm too much of a lazy bastard to like it.

Everybody has to try this one by himself to see if he enjoys it!

N/R