Recent reviews by Maledy

A perfect litte time killer. It will only last you a few hours, but they charge very little for it and I'd say the price is more than worth the enjoyment,

Pros:
- The combat is very clean and decently intuituve
- The difficulty curve is handled quite well.
- The abilities are well thought out and are all mechanically distinct.

Cons:
- The three combat types (magic, ranged, melee) are a bit unballanced. Magic is quite OP, whereas Ranged is very underpowered. I stuck with magic for the entire game and only used melee when I needed to get health back, and ranged on bosses once to apply poison.
- The game has a minor stability issue. After a certain amount of projectiles get fired in a single session, it starts to stutter. A quick reboot will fix the problem, and it takes quite a long time before this happens so it's not a big deal.
- No gamepad support. A game like this would play better with a gamepad than KBM.

If you do plan to play this game, take my advice: max out movement speed first.

9.5/10

Eternal Lore is a "hack and slash" RPG. The plot of the game is the usual generic fanasy RPG plot: evil sealed away is being released, you must stop it.

Pros:
- The combat is very well designed, and flows very well.
- The maps are quite expansive, and there are plenty of areas to explore, with useful to find in them.
- Enemy variety is quite strong, and in general the enemy AI is well programmed.
- The dialog is decently written.
- The English translation is very polished (the game was made by a Thai company).
- No loading times at all, and the game is very stable. I ran into zero bugs during my 16+ hours playing it.
- A very respectible game length that didn't feel like it was intentionally drawn out to me.

Cons:
- One of the game's main mechanics is dodge rolling, which is controlled by double tapping a direction key. Unfortunetly it's a bit unresponsive at times, and the keypress detection needs imporvement.
- The game's monitary system is not all that well designed in my opinion. Pretty much no enemies drop Gold, just various items, and it's hard to tell what is safe to sell, and what you might need later for crafting purposes.
- The graphics are pretty low key. Personally I don't care about this, but the game looks about on par with Nintendo 64 era 3D graphics.
- Inventory management could have been handled a bit better, such as an option to manually (or even automatically) sort your bag. It gets hard to find what you're looking for later in the game.
- The controls for dialog aren't stellar. You have to drag your mouse down and click an arrow icon with a very small mouse region each time.
- No gamepad support. And considering how many action bar slots the game has, I don't know if there will ever be support.

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Overall I VERY MUCH enjoyed this game, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys hack and slash RPGs. This was the most fun I've had with any game in quite some time.

I'd rate it 4.5 out of 5 - very much recommended!

While my overall experience with this game has been more positive than negative, I feel that I should list the things I liked about the game, as well as the things I despised:

Pros:
- The battle system if very well designed. I personally suck at combo attack fighting games, but I had no problems with this one. The issue that most games like this usually have is that in the heat of battle most people forget all of the fancy attacks they have access too and just start button mashing, but I did not have that problem (much) with this game. I never found myself not using an attack pattern or ability that I unlocked, as they are all very well designed to be useful for different situations.
- The character animations are well made, and the visuals are "pretty". I'm not sure why the game needed to be in 3D, but at least I never had any problems with being able to see visually what was going on (no particle spam overload or anything like that).

Cons (Combat):
- The game is very unfair. Not challenging: unfair. It seems to just expect you to chug health potions, since there is no way to avoid most attacks (not completely), especially in multi-attacker encounters. Quite a few enemies use hitscan guns that cannot be dodges except by the roll mechanic (which has a limited number of uses in a row).
- Enemies attack in impossible to predict patterns. All enemies from bosses to the smallest bugs have many different attack patterns, and while this means that their AI is generally good and challenging, too many of their attacks are impossible to predict the first time you see them. This seems to be the kind of game were "skill" needs to be built: you are going to get hit by enemy attacks that you have never seen before.
- Knockdowns. There is almost no "temparary invulnerability" after being struck, and you can find youself in situations a lot where you've been stunned or knocked to the ground and are forced to just sit there and wait while all of the enemies score free hits on you.
- Encounters. Occationally (and usually without warning) the game will lock you into an unescapable encounter, 2D-fighter style. Your only option here is to beat all of the enemies. While this would normally work "fine", the encounter zones are all very broken, and enemies often go "off screen" where you cannot see or hit them and continue to attack you.
- Dodging is the main mechanic of this game's combat, and it is at times a bit... broken. The time window to dodge an attack is so small that you sometimes would need to have started to dodge before the attack was even initialized. Some bosses also seem to ignore your dodge and hit you anyways.
- Bosses. All bosses work in the 2D-fighter style of locking you into a single-screen that cannot scroll, but most of them are just prolonged invulnerability sequences with TINY windows of time where you can actually damage them. In most cases, bosses move to the "background" when they cannot be hurt, but as this is a 3D game, it's very hard to tell when they are "out of bounds", or can be attacked.

Cons (General):
- Despite the claims of being a "Metroidvainia" style game, the game itself is quite linear, and has a nastly habit of locking you out of maps during arbitraty points in the story it doesn't give any indication of, causing many of the side quests to be impossible to finish.
- Exploration is limited; you won't find much if you do choose to explore, only chests with some RNG spawned random loot that is usually of not use.
- The writing. I know this is a Chinese-Translated game, but even accounting for the laughably terrible translation (I swear they must have just machine translated this game), I cannot see how the writing could be anything but abismal even before it was translated. It feels like everyone has the IQ of a dented shovel with a smiley face drawn on it, and have no concept of what is the bleedingly obvious. The dialog feels mechanical and stiff; the kind of thing that would never take place IRL.
- This is one of the worst translated games I've ever seen. Like nearly on "All your base are belong to us!" levels of terrible. I could generally guess at what they ment to say/mean, but not always, and they often use an incorrect, but very similarly spelled word in places, making sentances incomprehensible unless you guess what word them meant to use. And to make matters worse, some quests are in the style of "riddles", which are VERY VERY hard to figure out if the descriptions are unclear.
- The voice acting. MY GOD it's bad. It also baffles me as to why the developers would pay for English voice actors if they weren't going to get an ACTUAL translator...
- As a "2.5D" game, the environments are obviously all in 3D, but the movement path is static 2D. Too often I found myself trying to jump onto/fell off of a ledge that was supposed to be "background", and was very visually hard to differentiate.
- The equipmmet system was not well designed. I think I was 20+ hours into the game before I found an armor piece that was better than my starting gear, and enemies continue to do more damage as you get further along.

A handy way to kill an hour or so. If you're bored and like hack and slash games, give it a go.

Controls and movement feel a bit odd and unatural, but I aclimated quickly enough. The gameplay is actually pretty challenging too.

Overall I'd give it a B- (heh).

Apparently I'm "not ready" with a score of 0.1, which I'm sorry but: "bullsh*t".

My GPU may be around 3 years old at this point, but it's aged extremely well and I see no reason to upgrade:

I have an AMD Radeon HD 7950, and I run 3 monitors off it and can run a high-end modern game while keeping my 3D modeling work up on my secondary monitor (3ds Max), and playing a video on my tertiary monitor (i.e. YouTube or Netflix).

For example, I ran the new DOOM (2016) on ultra max+ settings without any real fps drop (meaning it never dropped any lower than 50 fps, even during the most grueling rendering scenes).

I'm unconvinced the test worked properly on my card. For one thing it seemed to only run a TINY windowed mode application, at around 1/4 of my monitor's total size (1920x1080). I'm unsure if this was intentional or not. Nevertheless, I watched the test several times and noticed no stuttering of any kind, just smooth rendering.

...But then I'm also unsure what is up with it looking for "90fps", as I wouldn't have been able to tell ya if the framerate dipped at all unless it went below 60 fps - no human could. Our eyes cannot register that level of framerate because they themselves do not operate at such high levels...

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For the sake of total clarity, my specs and test results in full:

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600 @3.40GHz (8 cores, quad-core multithreaded)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7950 w/ 3gb vRAM
System RAM: 16gb (DDR3, dual channel - 2 8gb sticks)
Primary Drive: 1tb SSD
Secondary Drive: 2tb HHD

*I also have my card overclocked with the core @500MHz and the memory @1250MHz.

Score:
Average Quality: 0.1 (Low)
Frames Tested: 7940
Frames Below 90 fps: 4247 (53.4%)
Frames CPU Bound: 5 (0%) *This was a flat 0 on my first test as well.

This is probably one of the best games I have played in *years*! I want to write a in-depth review, but I simply don't belive I can do that without spoiling it, so I'll just say a bit about the game in general:
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The Magic Circle is a saterical story-driven explorative game about you (the player) play testing a game being developed by an egotisical game designer who is never happy with his work. You are inseted into his unfionished game, were a mysterious entity wants you to bring it all crashing down on his head. You play through the game rewriting the game from the inside, controlling it to your advantage as you hide your presense from the system.

The story and personal conflicts are derlivered through both hiden collectables and story elements. As you progress, the story gets more and more surreal, as what defines the game you are playing is further called into question.

It's a very open game, with no major hints or "hand holding" - you figure out how to proceed, and there are always multiple ways do so.

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The game even has a *demo* (haven't seen a demo in YEARS!), so I STROYNGLY recommend this game to anyone, and you can try it for free and decide for yourself.

It's "ok".

For all the the first of the two "reboot" Tomb Raiders by Crystal Dynamics had A LOT of things that GREATLY irked me (i.e. 100,000 quicktime events, Laura either falling from 10+ stories or getting "captured" every 5 feet, and the plot with the other crew members playing out like a back "slasher" film, etc.), I still found it MUCH more "enjoyable" than this one, for the following reasons:

1) Exploration rewarded you. There was ONE map/chart per area that "marked" the location of all the items onto your zone map. In this version, there's A LOT more "AAA game hand-holding", and each zone has anywhere from 3-10 different things that will "show" tiny parts of what you can find on the map.
...And if that wasn't annoying enough for you, most of the "hey look over here" maps/charts are laid out DIRECTLY on the "story path", so you would have needed to suffer MANY blows to the head to miss them...

2) Ironically, while the zones themselves at first impression SEEM much larger and more "openly explorable", it's actually a facade, and they are EXTREMELY linear as far as how much you are "allowed" to explore - you have to backtrack TONS more than in the first game after ytou reach the arbiotrary story point at which you gain the item needed to uplock more of the zone.
One of the ones that irked me the most was that the tombs themselves (i.e. the fun parts of the games where all the ACTUAL "TOmb Raide-raiding tombs puzzels" were hiding) were almost UNANIMOUSLY "locked off" until you progressed far ebnough into the sotyline to gain the item to get inside them.
What's worse is that VERY often the "item" needed to gain entry to said tombs WASN'T EVEN THEN USED AS PART OF THE TOMB'S PUZZLE (i.e. the one that required the "rebreather" for Laura to swim more than 10 meteres without drowning or something, cuz ya know, it's not like all that mountain climbing in thin atmosphere envirnonments woulda naturally given her a much larger lung capacity and tollerance for less oxygen! Oh wait...).

3) The actual "Tomb Puzzles" were more "linear" than in the last game, and I found the "solutions" t be a lot simpler and easier to figure out as well.
Now, I don't mean "linear" in the sense of "only one path" in this case, what I mean is that you may be carrying 5+ different things that *LOGICALLY* would have functionally solved the challenge presented to you, but ONLY the one Crystal Dynamics "thought of" will work, so it turn into a game of "die until I figure out how YOU want me to solve this puzzle"...

I wanna get some *special* hate on for a "round robin boat pulling" tomb that took me EONS to "figure out", cuz the boats themselves did not behave "naturally" - they did not follow the current of the river, and their behavior "changed" as soon as yopu jumped onto one of them as well (and while I was QUITE capabale of simply "jumping" to where I needed to go FROM one of the boats, it would not let me "ledge grab" until I was on the "correct" boat...).
I mean, what is this - a 90's adventure game!?

4) The "coin collection" aspect of the game was TERRIBLY managed. You may have walked DFIRECTLY over the SPECIFIC location where a "coin cache" was burried 100+ times, but until you find the SPECIFIC map/chart that TELLS you it's "burried there", and give you a map marker for it, you can't loot them. While you could argue this means "go fnd the maps/charts", in reality it means "stop having fun freely exploring and progress into the story until we HAND you the map/chart along the story path where you can't miss it...).

5) The combat is basically unchanged since the first one. Sure, you can "craft bombs" and "switch out weapon types", but the effects of changing weapons were superficial at best, and some of the "perks" for setting traps were COMPLETELY pointless, such as the "turn enemy radios into proximity mines", and "turn enemy bodies into poison traps". I honestly got throught the ENTIRE game not getting to try either of these even ONCE (and almost ALL of my kills were "stealth kills" as well), simply because the locations were enemies will actually DROP their radios are rigidly determined, and none of them let you take the "crafted proximitiy mine" to the next enemy encounter. As for the "dead body trap" thing, this has more to do with the enemy AI zoning - you would need to:
A) Kill an enemy from stealth with more enemies remaining in the area.
B) Have his body be in the open and "visible" to other enemies (nearly impossible to do with "stealth kills").
C) Not get "spotted" at all, or they wouldn't "check the body".

6) I was kinda sad that rope arrows became "contexztual only" - I had so many laughs in the first game using them to yank enemies off cliffs! XD

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So in summery, I really don't recommend this to anyone who wants to explore and play fun, thought provoking puzzles. I would highly recommend the first one over this one, but even so, I still think it's better than a lot of the garbage comming out of late from the AAA circle, so I will give the game a *tentative* "yes" (if Steam offered a "horizontal thumb" "Meh" option, though, I'd be picking that one... >_<).

[VR Review]

I got a Vive VR headset, and this was the first game I wanted to try it on. Anyways, first impressions were very good - the VR experience is very amazing. The controls took a bit of getting used to (although keep in mind that this could just be because I'm new to VR).

My current graphics card is an AMD Fury, but even with that I had to lower the settings to around medium quality overall to stop the framerate tearing I was seeing. The calibration and aiming controls for interacting with the environment work well, and I ran into no problems with those.

The only major issue I had was that I could not figure out how to open the inventory. All the other buttons worked correctly (i.e. interacting, movement, jumping, etc.), but no matter what I tried the inventory button wouldn't work. I may have been using it wrong I suppose, but I doubt it, as I'm already very farmiliar with the gameplay of The Solus Project. The radial menu for inventory opens correctly for crafting and interacting with other objects, too.

But besides that one issue, it's a truely excelent VR experience!

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<ORIGINAL NON-VR REVIEW>
[The review was getting so many edits to it, and was getting really messy, so I'm doing a complete rewrite...]

First impressions were a bit clunky - it took me a while to get used to some of the controls and elements of the game, but I started having fun after that with a lot of the puzzles. The game reminds me the most of "Myst/Riven", and the puzzles are somewhat challegning. That being said, the "challenege" of the puzzels is mostly the challenge of finding the next switch far too often lol...

In any case, if you are looking for an atmospheric puzzle game with a deep intriguing story, I high heartily recommend this game. It is a lot buggier than any other "Early Access" game I've played, though.

Some of the biggest annoyances for me are that you get ONE save slot (which can be TERRIBLY gamebreaking for any number of reasons when a save occurs at a TERRIBLE time), and there is no real way to completely turn off the "survival" elements of the game for people (like me) who would much rather just "explore" without having to manage an absurd amount of "survival" elements...

Additionally, the falling damage is ABSURDLY unfair and broken - your legs must be made of chewed up toothpicks, because a 3 foot fall causes falling damage ffs, and it scales in damage EXPONENTIALLY fast, so that anything above 15 feet or so just plain up MURDERS you.

THANK GOD that the collision detetction is ETREMELY sound, so at least I'm not dying because I slid down a slope all the time like some other games I could mention! n.nU

On the plus side, it's SO REFRESHING to see a game that DOESN'T use "invisible walls" all over the place (the ONLY time I ever ran into one was when I tried to swim very far out into the ocean, and I guess that's fair - it's hard to come up with any other way to add a barrier in that situation).

Also, the game runs flawlessly in "Fullscreen Mode" - it just freezes up and lags like mad in "Windowed Mode".

So I DEFINATLY recommend you try this game! I've been wanting a fun and challenging puzzle game for a long time (one that DOENS'T include tons of "horror" elements, whcih all the morte recent ones usually have, sadly...).

This going to essential boil down to "if you liked Evoland, you probably won't like Evoland 2", but I will go into a bit more detail than that:

There is very little of Evoland left in this game. Besides the odd graphical shifts *every few flipping hours* of gameplay, this is nothing even remotely like the original, and contains very few of the unique mechanics of the original.

It is essentially an EXTREMELY LINEAR 2D, story-driven RPG. That's about all there is to say really. You can easily miss half of the chests be going through "points of no return" that you couldn't possible predict as well (due to "story flags" preventing backtracking).

Uh, and the pop cuture parody references to other games of the eras it depicts are laided on so thickly they aren't even the least bit funny. I mean, there's even a stealth section where you hide under a cardboard box FFS.

So no - I do not recommend this game. If you were looking for something similar to Evoland, look elsewhere. If you want a strictly linear, extremely "flaggy" story-driven "16-bit era" RPG with TONS AND TONS of cutscenes, then I guess you would like Evoland 2...

I have clocked in more than 300 hours in Fallout 4, so I feel qualified to write this review now:

If you are expecting a game that plays like Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, you may end up disappointed. Somewhere along the lines (while they were ripping off the parts of Mass Effect that I HATED the most), Bethesda seems to have forgotten that this franchise is supposed to be an RPG, or "Roleplaying Game".

In truth, besides picking your character's name, gender, customizing their looks with one of THE least intuitive face sculpting tools I have EVER seen, you are presented with VERY few opportunities or situations where you actions have consequences, or change how the rest of the game plays out.

Allow me to explain: apart from the "picking a side" aspect that they ripped off from Fallout: New Vegas, very few quests present you, the player, with alternatives that affect how the quest ends. Part of this may be due to the removal of the skills that all Fallout games have had since Fallout 1 so many years ago, but rarely do you decisions mean anything. The quests are very linear, and rarely are you given an alternative method of completing them.

Additionally, there are very few REAL quests. There are about 10,000 radiant quests, that consist of "go to X location and kill X enemy", but thinking back now, besides the faction-specific portions of the main quests, I can only think of maybe 15 real side quests that did not follow the formula I mentioned above.

Another major sticking point: Exploration. While the infinitely repeating radiant quests seem specifically designed to introduce you, the player, to a location you haven't visited yet, there is very little in trying to explore anything that doesn't have a map marker. Gone are the fun, hard to fine unmarked locations with hilarious easter eggs or unique loot - there really just isn't... any of that. I am an avid free-roaming explorer, and I was disappointed that so much of the unmarked space was so... empty and meaningless. Sure, they remember to toss some random static objects around, but nothing you can collect, nothing that is a challenge to locate and thus gives a sense of achievement for finding it.

The underwater sections are the worst part of the free-roaming exploration aspect - do not even bother looking for stuff underwater. Even if there is a sunken ship, it will not have ANY loot in in. I kept a tally, and the number of actual lootable objects I found in the underwater sections of the exterior worldspace was 8! And every single one of them was very much so in the open and trivially easy to spot, further cheapening any actual sense of meaningful accomplishment for finding it...

Now, of the new features Fallout 4 was so eager to tote, let's begin with base building. Yes, it is very fun - at first. Once you realize there are very view actual set pieces for you to build with, and that the collision on them is so buggy that you can rarely actually build what YOU want with them, it starts to feel very hollow. Furthermore, as the world opens up and you are given more settlements to babysit, it starts to become too much to handle. I started groaning whenever I was given a new settlement, and why? Because you are now under the obligation to maintain it, and defend it. So that just meant another hour of my time setting up the same prefab setup of defenses, crops, beds, and water supply that I used for every base I did not actually care about.

Furthermore, do not be fooled into thinking that the bases can fend for themselves. You will randomly get messages saying "X settlement is under attack!", and at that point, you MUST drop everything and go help. It doesn't matter if the settlement being attacked is armed with 10,000 missile turrets and a squad of guards wearing top of the line Power Armor and Gatling Lasers, because of you don't show up, the game just rolls a RNG and "decides" how much of you stuff to blow up, regardless of any other factors. So even if you are 5 loading screens down, balls deep in a dungeon, be prepared to drop everything you are doing and make a mad dash for the settlement that's being attacked. I properly defended all my settlements, so 100% of the time when I was finished "warping in" (fast traveling), the "attack" was already over and I had "won" before the screen even finished loading in, and the attackers were nothing more than bloody smears on the cement...

Moving onto the second toted feature: gun mods. I will admit these were also fun - at first. Very quickly, however, I realized that in total, there were about 20 guns and melee weapons in Fallout 4, and while sure you can use weapon mods to make them behave a bit differently, that's just too damn few. I quickly grew bored of every gun, and could not use the strategy I used for previous Fallout games when this happened (go grab a new gun mod to try), because even at the time of writing, we (the modders) still haven't decoded the game enough to be able to add new unique weapons or armors to the game, and this has nothing to do with the delay of the CK/GECK (which still won't be released for several months at least), but because of all the changes that Bethesda made to the .nif systems (which they would not tell us about even after the tools have been released, as Bethesda has not released their true modding suite of dev tools since flipping Morrowind, relying on the community to come up with 3rd party hack tools to add new models to the game).

And finally, I would like to mention how much recycling Bethesda did of previous game's asserts. While I know that Todd Howard said that Fallout 4 began with a port of Skyrim to the Xbone, the sheer number of reused assets is rather disappointing, and quite galling. Want an easy to spot example? The "wild dogs" use the ENTIRE Skyrim wolf sound set - from breathing, to walking, to attacking, to death sounds - it's all EXACTly 110% the same, with ZERO changes.
So many environment assets were ported directly from Fallout 3/Fallout: New Vegas as well, without even bothering to give them an HD makeover, so they look jarringly low poly and generally low grade, and clash with the rest of the environment. And the creatures? Once I thought about it, I had a hard time coming up with a SINGLE creature that didn't either use a Skyrim creature's skeleton rigging and animations, or was just ported from Fallout 3/New Vegas:

Deathclaws? Werewolves.
Molerats? Skeevers.
Blood bugs?
Chaurus Hunters.
Yao Guai? Bears (also with a 100% Skyrim sound set and additional NO MODEL CHANGES AT ALL - just some texture swaps ffs!).
Radstags? Elk/Deer.
All the robots? Fallout 3/New Vegas ports (besides maybe the new assultrons, but they just use humanoid rigging anyways).
Bloatflies? Fallout 3/New Vegas ports. Radscorpions?
Fallout 3/New Vegas ports. Mirelurks? Fallout 3/New Vegas imports.
Mirelurk Kings? Fallout 3/New Vegas imports.
Super Mutant Behemoths? Giants.
Super Mutants? Fallout 3/New Vegas ports with a few "tweaks".

The only exceptions I can think of are the Radroaches, which at least had new attack animations made for them (although the rest of their rigging and animations are Fallout 3/New Vegas imports), and the Mirelurk Hunters, which look like they use a modified Mudcrab rig with a few new animations.

And then there's the sheer number of humanoid animations that are COMPLETELY identical to the ones created for Skyrim, such as the ones for sitting down or a chair, or lying down onto a bed, etc.

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So do I recommend this game? Well, tentatively "yes', but only because it's still better than most of the garbage coming out lately (and when/if modding *FINALLY* gets released, there will be a lot of well made mods to add content to it, as always).

But you are honestly better off just playing Fallout: New Vegas to be perfectly honest...