Recent reviews by Vis

Get it on sale.

What can I say about Baldur's Gate 3 that hasn't already been said?

This game is truly a masterpiece. I have never had a game so full of rich content that it took me nearly 70 hours to complete on my first playthrough - not because it was difficult or tedious, but because there is genuinely so much you can do. My first experience with Larian Studios was Divinity: Original Sin 2, which I put around 250 hours into over the course of a year or so. I loved it so much, and I was anxiously waiting for BG3 to fully release before jumping into it, and man am I glad I did.

Let's start with the cons first:

Admittedly, the combat system can sometimes be a little slow. I've had a couple of fights where one of the enemies simply did nothing on their turn except wait ~20-30 seconds before ending it. Additionally, there are times where attacks take a few seconds to register, which just feel a little unengaging. Overall, the combat is fun and rewarding of strategy and positioning, but falls just short on a few (admittedly minor) areas.

This is an extremely minor con for me. The game is absolutely massive, and most of the time it runs fantastically. However, particularly once you make it to the titular city, performance can take a pretty significant hit. I by no means have the latest next-gen PC, but my 9700k (yes I know I need to upgrade) and RTX 3080 would occasionally drop to the 40-60 fps range. Still acceptable for me, especially since it's turn-based, but sometimes a little jarring.

Look, I am a huge D&D fan. I've been a DM and player for 3 years with my friends, and we've always played 5e. However, I personally am not a massive fan of the 5e ruleset. This is mostly because of how combat and interactions in D:OS2 are very different from 5e, so it takes a little bit of getting used to. Also, many situations in tabletop D&D can be handled diplomatically or by "rule of cool" mechanics, rather than hard-and-fast rules. At the end of the day, however, this is a video game and therefore cannot be expected to handle every possible situation under the sun.

The story of the game is immersive and gripping. Larian Studios is a studio that never ceases to amaze me with the sheer volume and quality of writing in their games. The characters make sense, their actions align with their motivations, and each character is a dynamic being that changes in response to your and their actions. The moral dilemma surrounding the main story (whether or not to embrace the illithid tadpole) is interesting and the NPCs react to your choices one way or the other.

Speaking of a dynamic story, BG3 constantly kept me immersed in the world and genuinely wanting to learn more about it rather than skip through dialogues. Every single creature in the game is fully voiced with dialogue (with the exception of many corpses), and you can learn information from seemingly unrelated sources. Every book has text, whether it be a short bracketed summary or actual lore, books are not just placed for decoration.

The game looks amazing. The quality of effects, textures, and sounds make the game feel real and powerful. One of the small effects I noticed that really drew me to look further into this was a lingering trail of smoke coming from an Eldritch Blast. Minor details like that add a layer of finesse on top of an already beautiful game.

Obviously, I can't fit everything I want to say about this game into this single review. To summarize: Baldur's Gate 3 is a breathtaking achievement that I believe will have lasting effects on the future of game development. If you don't believe me, even other game developers[www.playstationlifestyle.net] are worried about its impact. If you were on the fence about BG3 for any reason, I would highly suggest picking it up and at least trying it.

Overall Rating: 9.8/10

This game is truly amazing. I was looking for a new game to play a couple months ago and saw Baldur's Gate 3. I'm a big D&D fan so I was looking into it and talking about it to one of my friends who mentioned this game and that I should try it before BG.

Boy am I glad that I did.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a story-driven RPG in which you play as a Godwoken: someone chosen by one of the gods themselves to ascend to become the next Divinity after the previous one died. You can play with up to a party of 4 or as a solo while adventuring through dungeons, caves, towns, and cities. If you like RPGs that truly give you a lot of choice and of which your choices actually matter, then you will love this game.

The game has 6 unique Origins with their own in-depth storylines, interactions, and dialogue, so if you're an achievement hunter like myself, you get to play the game multiple times to truly experience all it has to offer. The amount of replayability in this game is truly astounding; I'm nearly 200 hours in and STILL uncovering new things and learning new strategies and tactics.

For the brutal, hardcore lovers, the game's Honour Mode is a strong challenge. It's a hardcore perma-death mode that's very difficulty to savescum - although I wouldn't recommend trying anyway. You can only have one save file, and it automatically saves whenever a character dies. If all the characters in your party are dead at once, it's game over, the save file deletes itself, and you have to start over from the beginning.

I could keep talking about this game for hours, but really you just need to experience it for yourself. The amount of customization, choices, strategy, and story built into this game is extraordinary, and I cannot wait until the release of Baldur's Gate 3.

Don't look at the Reddit. It's a humbling experience.

TL;DR: Definitely a fun game. Like many games of this genre, it's very pay-to-win, however unlike many games of this genre, it is much more forgiving and enjoyable for people who don't want to spend more money on a game.

Personally, I enjoy spending a little bit to unlock some more things, it's what got me to where I'm at.

What I personally love about this game is that the developers at least appear to listen to their players. Even though customer support is lackluster at best, the game has a large community on Discord to help people with many of their issues. They also create a lot of gift codes for free rewards. They're not a lot, but they definitely help for the free-to-play and low spenders.

Pros:
- Much more F2P friendly than other strategy MMO games.
- Quick access to training/healing troops and building queues.
- Relatively quick progress of immortals.
- Infinite potential for jumper accounts.

Cons:
- No open field combat.
- Lack of major events (new events are being released, however).
- Minor translation issues (in English, potentially others).
- Incredibly loud audio (seems to be exclusive to Steam edition).

Overall, this is a solid kingdom builder with potential to become one of the best games of the SMMO genre.

Such an amazing game to play with friends and strangers alike. I'm normally awful when it comes to scary/horror games, but Phasmophobia strikes an amazing combination of fun and fear.

Great to play with friends, has a couple major and several minor bugs but an active developer constantly working to improve the game.

8/10

Full review coming later

I first played through this game back when Discord Prime had free games you could play. I saw it and it looked really fun so I tried it and played through it all day. Wanted to support directly so I bought it on here, too. Just finished playing through it again, and I took some choices I didn't take on the first time (no spoilers, don't worry).

The Labyrinths expansion adds so much to the game, too! It doesn't allow for a ton of path choice, but there are a few mission options that you can pick from a couple options.

Definitely a great casual game that can occupy a few hours of your time!

Definitely enjoy the game. There's so much you can do as a player, dozens of custom gamemodes. The game also includes a scripting engine in Lua so you can create your own custom addons, models, weapons, gamemodes, anything you want really.

I've spent all of my time playing TTT. Literally never played another gamemode. Great to play with friends.

Make sure you play with friends, or else it probably won't seem as fun.

Queue times can take some time, but in my experience they never exceed 5 minutes.

Don't worry too much about what operators you buy at first (and when you have the renown to buy an operator - DO IT) because all operators are useful in some way and are all better than Recruit.

In a nutshell: I cannot recommend this game more. The beauty of RimWorld isn't just that you get to build your own virtual colony, but the story that drives that colony. Each game is driven by a Storyteller, which makes every RimWorld colony different. You will be forced to deal with sacrifices, but that makes the triumphs feel that much more satisfying.