Recent reviews by G00N3R

The Lamplighters League is a turn based tactics game similar to XCOM, where a group of thieves and adventurers must stop the Banished Court from using occult magic to enter an ancient tower and conquer the world.

The game was developed by Harebrained Schemes, who are experienced in the turn based genre, having previously worked on Battletech and the Shadowrun trilogy. I enjoyed all of those games.


• Depending on the mission type, you’ll control a squad of three or four characters. On your turn each character has two action points to move, attack, activate a special ability, or use a consumable such as a grenade or medkit. Attacks have hit percentages so there’s a chance you’ll miss, and environmental objects provide full or half cover.

• Before entering combat you can move around in real time and use stealth abilities to eliminate enemies, reducing the number you’ll have to fight.

• The Banished Court’s army includes Human soldiers, mummies, skeletons, shades, and other monsters. Enemies have a mixture of melee and ranged attacks, and other magical abilities such as summoning minions, slowing your characters, or setting large areas on fire.

• There are also three powerful bosses, the leaders of separate factions within the Banished Court. They have unique abilities, and you’ll definitely have to fight them during important story missions, but they can also appear in regular missions.

• There are ten characters to recruit who have their own unique skills, which could provide interesting tactical combinations, although I only got six of them because of the campaign’s time limits. My favourites were Ingrid, a melee specialist who can gain extra ability points for each kill, Eddie, whose guns can hit multiple enemies per attack, Lateef, who specialises in distracting enemies and evading their attacks, and Ana who is the healer.

• I played on the “adventurer” (medium) difficulty, which was quite challenging, mainly because of the high number of enemies. I regularly saw 10-14 enemies per encounter, plus 1-2 teleporters which would each spawn 3 reinforcements after a few turns, plus some enemies can summon minions. And of course the more powerful enemies have lots of health, so you have to hit them multiple times. Meanwhile, with so many enemies on the map, it can sometimes be hard to find opportunities for stealth kills because they’re all standing in each other’s vision cones. Plus most non-Human enemies are immune to takedowns anyway.

• Thankfully, as your characters level up they can acquire several abilities which give them extra attacks or free movement. Ingrid in particular is pretty much essential for crowd control, if you use other characters to wound enemies so that Ingrid can get the kills. You also don’t have to kill every enemy on the map. After completing the mission objectives you could just try to run to the exit. And you can save during missions, so I got into the habit of saving after each encounter just in case something went wrong.

• Characters who participate in missions can also equip magical playing cards which give them passive or active abilities, including powerful attacks, extra ability points, increased health, an area of effect heal, or regaining health from each kill. However, if they take too much damage, they’ll gain a temporary debuff card.


• On the world map, you’ll see three separate Doomsday clocks relating to each of the Banished Court’s factions. As they complete activities each week, their progress meters will advance. When they reach specific “break points”, the enemies you fight in missions will become more powerful. And if either Doomsday clock reaches the maximum level, you’ll lose the campaign.

• Every completed mission will set back one of the faction’s clocks, but as you can only perform one mission each week (even after you’ve recruited enough characters to field two teams), the other two factions will usually advance. And you can never reduce them below a break point. This means you can’t stop the clocks fully, you can only try to slow them down long enough to complete your own objectives. When I reached the final mission, each Doomsday clock was around two thirds full, so I wasn’t in immediate danger of losing, but you can’t afford to waste much time.

• In addition to story missions where you’ll steal various items needed to enter the tower and sever the Banished Court’s connection to magic, there are optional missions to recruit more characters or reset a Doomsday clock back to the last break point. You can perform missions in any order.

• Characters who aren’t in your active squad for the next mission can be sent to gather information to reveal new missions, or to collect supplies needed to craft consumables, improved armour, and special upgrades.

• You’ll also see a random event each week, which gives you a choice of reward. This can include various supplies, but for obvious reasons I always chose to reduce a faction’s doomsday clock when that was an option.


• Story is basic, but its at least good enough to provide motivation to complete the campaign. You’ll get more details from post mission debriefs as well as lore documents which can be found during missions.

• Between missions, characters will talk to each other which lets you learn about their personalities and backstory.

• Voice acting is quite good.


• It took me 36 hours to finish the campaign.

• I didn’t have any problems with crashes or framerate.

• Unless I set all the graphics to low, this game pushes my graphics card temperature higher than AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West and Last of Us. While I would describe Lamplighters League’s graphics as “fine”, they’re certainly not AAA quality.

• There are a limited number of maps, so I regularly saw repeats of maps I’d visited previously. One time I even saw the same map for two consecutive missions.


The Lamplighters League is a good game which has challenging combat, and while it has some flaws, fans of the turn based tactics genre will probably find something to enjoy. Its worth picking up on a sale.

Star Trek Resurgence is a narrative focused adventure featuring the crew of the USS Resolute on a diplomatic mission, which leads them to discover a threat to the safety of the entire galaxy.


• The player controls two characters in different scenes, Commander Jara Rydek, and engineer Carter Diaz.

• You’ll make dialogue choices during conversations with other characters to influence the story, while your decisions on the bridge will affect the safety of your crew in key moments.

• There are a few basic combat scenes where you’ll need to fight enemies with your phaser. Controls aren’t great, but the difficulty is quite lenient, as it takes three hits to kill the player. There are also stealth sections where you have to sneak past enemies.

• In other scenes you’ll need to use a tricorder to scan the environment for clues, perform QTEs to activate or repair devices, and avoid hazards while piloting a shuttle.


• Story is very well written, and its got everything you’d want to see in Star Trek. Diplomats trying to find peaceful solutions in conflicts with alien races, science officers investigating strange space anomalies, away teams involved in combat situations, and large scale starship battles, while also giving you time to interact with and get to know the rest of the crew.

• Having two playable characters allows the story to flow at a good pace, while you see events from both perspectives.

• The Resolute’s crew are mostly likeable, however they won’t always agree with your decisions, and you’ll need to decide how to balance earning the trust of the crew with achieving a successful mission outcome.

• You’ll meet a couple of familiar faces, which provides a fun opportunity for long time fans of the franchise to assist these Star Fleet legends.

• Voice acting is very good.

• As a comparison to some of the recent TV shows, Resurgence isn’t as good as Strange New Worlds (I really like that show), but its much better than the last couple of seasons of Discovery.


• It took me 10 hours to finish the story.

• I didn’t have any problems with bugs, crashes, or framerate, however character/object movement sometimes appears jittery during action scenes.

• Texture quality is average and some objects have obvious jagged edges, but the options menu is basic, so there’s not much you can do to improve the visuals.

• During cutscenes, characters often raise their eyebrows in an extremely exaggerated way which looks really strange.


Star Trek Resurgence is a good game which has a very enjoyable story, and is definitely worth playing for franchise fans as long as you can accept basic gameplay and some janky performance.

I hope the game is successful enough for the developers to make a sequel, because I’d really like to see this crew again.

Turbo Overkill is a retro First Person Shooter similar to Dusk or Amid Evil, where player character Johnny Turbo must fight through hordes of Human and Cyborg enemies to stop a rogue AI from taking over the world.


• Movement speed is very fast.

• Good weapon variety including magnum, assault rifle, shotgun, double barrel shotgun, minigun, rocket launcher, plasma rifle, sniper rifle and ion cannon. Most weapons have a secondary fire mode.

• Your leg has a chainsaw attached, which lets you slide through groups of enemies, instantly killing weaker enemies. This can be upgraded to restore your health and armour with each kill.

• You’ll also gain a slow motion ability which is very useful for dealing with more dangerous enemies. Killing enemies during slow mo will make them drop ammo pickups.

• Customise your playing style by equipping upgrades such as increased maximum health, triple jump, and nearby ammo/health pickups being magnetised towards you.

• Level design can be annoying at times. This is one of those games that has lots of small platforms where you’ll need to jump, double jump, air dash, double air dash, wall run and grapple hook over bottomless pits. Thankfully the airborne gymnastics is fairly lenient (there were times where I felt like I missed a jump but the game decided it was close enough). But sometimes the level layouts are confusing and I’d spend a few minutes trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go next. And I lost count of the number of times I accidentally fell off a small platform while trying to shoot enemies.

• Hard difficulty is nicely balanced for an experienced FPS player during episodes 1 and 2 (each episode contains several levels), but episode 3 at times felt a bit too much. I got through it, but it was less fun. Most encounters involve being trapped in a small room with not much space to dodge and even less cover, while having to defeat multiple large waves of enemies. Eventually one of the rocket launcher wielding enemies would spawn right next to me and kill me before I had chance to react, sending me back to the start of the first wave. Probably more enjoyable on normal difficulty.

• I also want to give a special mention to the final level, which has several encounters where you have to defeat multiple waves of enemies within a strict time limit, or you’ll die instantly.

• Boss fights are mostly just bigger waves of the same enemies you’ve spent the whole game killing, while occasionally shooting the boss between waves.


• Story is nonsense. There’s not much of an intro to explain things and there are several occasions where NPCs refer to past events that I’m not familiar with, which made me wonder if this is actually a sequel to a game I never played. (I don’t think it is).

• Voice acting is fine.


• I finished the game in just under 17 hours.

• Controls are fully rebindable and work great with mouse and keyboard.

• I didn’t have any problems with bugs, crashes or framerate.

• Default field of view is too high. I don’t think I’ve ever changed my FOV in any game before, but everything looked really weird while I played through the first level. After consulting the forum and changing FOV from 90 to 74, everything looks normal.


Turbo Overkill is a good game that fans of retro FPSes should mostly enjoy, if you’re in the mood to just turn off your brain and shoot things. Worth buying on a small sale.

Expeditions: Viking is a tactics RPG where the player is the ruler of a small town in Denmark which is threatened by another clan. You’ll need to recruit a band of warriors and travel to Northern England and Scotland in search of allies and treasure.

I’ve already played Expeditions: Rome, which is the newest game in this franchise, and I think is massively underrated. Honestly I enjoyed Rome more than Baldurs Gate 3 (I’ve reviewed both games if you want to know why), but as the developers haven’t announced another game yet, I decided to go back and play the older game.


• Combat is turn based and is quite tactical. You’ll have an active party of 6 characters chosen from a squad of around 10-12. Each character has 2 action points to move and attack on their turn.

• Positioning on the hex grid is important. You’ll want to have shield wielders at the front to block enemy movement and protect your archers and healers, while some weapons such as spears have longer reach. Shields will sometimes prevent a character from taking health damage, but can be disabled by axe wielders using a pull move. And some weapons have special abilities, for example I found a spear that could penetrate 2 hexes, so while I had to be careful to avoid friendly fire, if 2 enemies were standing next to each other, I could get a double kill.

• Enemy AI is quite good, they’ll focus attacks on weaker characters, they’ll try to stun you, and they’ll put shield guys in chokepoints to block your movement while their archers hit you from miles away.

• Playing on normal difficulty, I didn’t lose many fights, but the challenge comes from trying to win without any character getting knocked out, because this can give them injuries which cause debuffs in upcoming fights. Injuries can be healed while camping on the world map, but the medicine costs are high and more serious injuries take longer to heal.

• During the camping phase you’ll also need to make sure everybody has enough food and sleep, and you can assign characters to hunt, guard the camp, and craft items.

• The campaign has a time limit, but this wasn’t a problem at all. I finished all the quests with about half of the time remaining.


• Main quest gives you a choice of which faction to support, and many conversations let you choose whether to be peaceful or aggressive.

• Even though it took me 30 hours to complete the campaign, the story felt a bit short. I was expecting some kind of twist leading to another chapter, so I was a bit surprised that the game ended when it did.

• There’s not much voice acting, and the few spoken lines are poor quality.


• Graphics relating to environment and character models are bad (and probably wouldn’t have been considered good 7 years ago either). I did like the character portraits though.


Expeditions Vikings originally released in 2017, so obviously its biggest flaws when compared to newer games relate to presentation of graphics and voice acting. Thankfully, the tactical combat is fun and the story is decent, so its worth picking up on a sale.

Horizon Forbidden West is an open world, third person action game which continues the story of Horizon Zero Dawn. The world’s biosphere is collapsing which could lead to another extinction event, and Aloy must find an artificial intelligence to heal the world, while some powerful villains have other plans.

Zero Dawn was one of my favourite games from the last few years, and Forbidden West combines good gameplay with an excellent story and high quality technical performance, but unfortunately there are lots of little annoyances that often get in the way of fully enjoying the game.


• Combat is challenging on normal difficulty, and becomes more enjoyable as you progress further into the game, acquiring better weapons which allow you to take advantage of each machine’s elemental weaknesses.

• There are several new machines to fight against, which have interesting designs based on animals and dinosaurs, including some huge bosses. Something about the animation of Human enemies makes them much easier to headshot, and therefore less annoying to fight, than they were in ZD.

• In addition to the main quest, there are lots of side quests which have unique short stories where you’ll need to help villagers, usually by protecting them from bandits or machine attacks. The open world has several activities, including tallnecks, cauldrons, bandit camps, combat arenas, races, a turn based minigame, and multiple types of collectable items to find.

• Main story is very well written, and features an outstanding voice acting performance from Ashly Burch, while the rest of the cast, including Hollywood stars Lance Reddick, Angela Bassett, and Carrie Ann Moss, also do a great job.

• Cutscenes feature excellent lip syncing and facial animations, which helps you to understand character emotions in each scene.

• Using Digital Foundry’s optimised graphics settings I was able to get a very smooth framerate while playing in 1440p (i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR4). I think the key setting here is texture quality. I started with it on very high and I noticed some frame drops, but after changing to high, performance across the main open world map was stable with no noticeable loss of picture quality.

• In most areas of the world, the environment looks stunning, from snowy mountains to a huge desert, tribal villages, old world ruins covered in plants, and lakes where you can swim underwater.

• It took me 79 hours to complete the main story, burning shores expansion, most of the side quests, and the open world activities which I found most interesting, which is great value at full price.

• The game only crashed twice, which I think is acceptable for such a long playing time.

• Controls are fully rebindable and work great with mouse and keyboard.


• Aloy’s dialogue while exploring and questing is extremely annoying, because she constantly tells the player exactly where to go and what to do. This doesn’t just relate to puzzle solving, but also basic world navigation. Climb that ladder. Stand on that crate to reach the ledge above. That gap is too far to jump, I’ll need to glide. She’ll draw our attention to important objects the moment we step into a room, before we even had a chance to find it for ourselves. She’ll constantly remind us about using the focus to look for hidden items, even though that’s a basic gameplay mechanic that we have to use in almost every quest. To be clear, I like Aloy’s personality during the story cutscenes. I just wish she’d be quiet while exploring the open world. I don’t need my hand to be held every step of the journey. Let me figure things out for myself.

• The first major area of the open world (after the tutorial), at the far east of the map, is spoiled by a high volume of dust particles in the air. When running around the open world, these particles fly at the screen like stars zooming past the USS Enterprise at warp speed. During cutscenes, having dozens of huge white dots floating around the whole screen was extremely distracting, and at times I struggled to concentrate on the dialogue. I spent about 10 hours completing quests in that area, and there’s no option to disable or reduce the effect. Thankfully, as you travel further west, the air becomes much clearer in most areas, although the dust particles do come back occasionally (seems to be worse when there are lots of trees nearby).

• Aloy’s focus has a green flashlight, but the player has no manual control and she hardly ever turns it on. There were several occasions, either in caves, or just exploring the open world at night, where I was struggling to see. My brightness settings are perfect during the day. The game really should have had a flashlight button.

• Crafting feels too grindy. Every weapon, armour, and ammo pouch has between 3-5 tiers of upgrades. Even machine overrides, its not enough to explore the cauldrons, you still need to actually craft each override. Every upgrade needs a specific component from a specific machine or animal, and they don’t always drop from each kill, so you’ll need to either spend hours trying to farm the items, or save up thousands of shards and just buy what you need from traders.

• Climbing controls lack precision. There were many occasions where I had to press the jump button 3-4 times to get Aloy to move up to the next hold point. Sometimes she’ll either yeet herself off a ledge in a random direction away from where you want to go, or do a small jump and fall short of the next platform.

• Even using optimised settings, the Burning Shores map had frame drops in some areas.


Horizon Forbidden West is a good game, and its definitely worth playing if you liked Zero Dawn, but it could have been so much better if not for a few poor design decisions that frequently undermine the fun parts of the game. As this is a direct sequel, you’ll need to play Zero Dawn first to properly understand the story.

Deepest Chamber: Resurrection is a roguelite deckbuilder where a party of adventurers must descend through a dungeon, killing various monsters.

The dungeon uses a node layout similar to other deckbuilders, including normal and elite fights, random events, shops, chests, shrines, and campfires, where you can acquire new cards and relics, upgrade cards, and heal the party, eventually leading to a boss fight. There are 4 acts, and each act has 2 different bosses which provides some variety to each run.

Combat is turn based, and each turn you’ll draw cards which cost energy to play, allowing you to attack, defend, or use special abilities. Deepest Chamber’s unique gameplay mechanic lets you boost a card by playing the card next to it in your hand. This will either increase the power of the boosted card, reduce its energy cost (sometimes even making it free to play), or trigger another special effect. Upgraded cards can be boosted multiple times to become even more powerful, while several relics and power cards trigger their abilities when a card is fully boosted.

Combat is very tactical because the position of the cards in your hand, and the order you play them, is important. You’ll often want to play the boosted version of a specific card, so you’ll need to play other cards next to it first. Some enemies will put curse cards into your hand which can disrupt your strategy, but there are a couple of ways to move a card to a different position in your hand.

There’s also some meta progression which lets you get stronger in future runs. You can unlock three new characters by gaining gold, killing elites, and winning a run. You’ll need to choose a party of three characters for each run, and there are six characters to choose from, which lets you try different tactical combinations. Each character has their own unique cards focusing on melee or magic attacks, gaining armour, healing allies, poisoning enemies, or summoning pets.

Some items bought from shops during a run are permanently unlocked. This includes weapons and armour equipped by each character, and recipes for crafting potions. You’ll collect crafting supplies after winning each fight and can brew new potions before a run. Unused potions stay in your inventory for use in the next run.

Difficulty seems quite well balanced to me, but I’ve got hundreds of hours experience of playing various other deckbuilders, which gave me a head start on the learning curve. When you lose a fight, you can retry 3 times before the run is over. A full run should take between 30-60 minutes depending on how many combat nodes you visit. There are 10 difficulty levels and also a final boss which has to be unlocked by collecting special relics.

Overall Deepest Chamber is a good deckbuilder which features tactical combat. Definitely worth playing for fans of the genre, and its really cheap too so there’s no reason not to give it a try.

Immortals of Aveum is a magic themed First Person Shooter.

In a world where there are three types of magic – red, green, and blue (I’m not being sarcastic, that’s what they’re actually called in game), two factions are locked in an endless war for control of this magic.

While most mages can only use one colour, player character Jak is a triarch, able to wield all three colours, which could make him the key to winning the war.


• Fight against enemy mages, elementals, and a few types of aggressive wildlife.

• Magic weapons have similar functions to standard FPS guns. Red is your shotgun, green is an SMG which fires homing projectiles, and blue is a long range rifle. You can find new weapons with different values for damage, rate of fire and clip size, to suit your playing style.

• You can also use several other abilities, including a shield which protects from damage but reduces your movement speed, a whip which can pull enemies closer (combines nicely with short range shotgun blasts), and various damage dealing spells which can be upgraded with extra effects when you level up.

• Map design is similar to Jedi Survivor, mostly linear, but with Metroidvania style barriers that you have to come back to when you learn the required ability. You’ll also need to double jump, glide, and use your whip on grapple points to cross bottomless pits and reach high ledges. Thankfully most of these platforming sections are much shorter and less annoying than those found in Jedi Survivor.

• There’s also some basic puzzle solving that mostly involves finding buttons hidden in the environment and shooting them with the relevant colour to open doors or move platforms.


• World building lacks detail. Why should I care about the outcome of the war, when I don’t really know anything about the world pre-war?

• Dialogue has a very “Disney Marvel” tone, where half the characters have a snarky personality and every conversation must have at least one dumb joke, which undermines dramatic situations and often makes me want everybody to just stop talking.

• Its not the fault of the voice actors, I think they did their best with the lines they were given to read. I’ve seen Gina Torres in multiple TV shows so I know she can act.


• It took me 16 hours to complete the story. I mostly focused on the main quest and didn’t spend much time exploring for secrets.

• I suffered from frequent shader stutter. Even when the framerate was stable, the game often didn’t feel smooth somehow. I tried changing various options but nothing really seemed to make a difference.

• I’m playing in 1440p with i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR4. While my graphics card is slightly weaker than the store page recommends, the menu gives each graphics setting a points value, and I’ve lowered some of the more expensive options so I’m well under budget.

• I didn’t have any bugs or crashes.

• Controls are fully rebindable and work well on mouse and keyboard.


Combat is entertaining but can be spoiled by performance issues. Story is garbage. Buy on sale, turn off your brain and just have fun shooting things.

I think this review is going to sound a bit negative, so the first thing I want to make clear is that I don’t think Viewfinder is a bad game, I just think its been massively overrated by some of the reviews and awards.

While the main gameplay mechanic of using photographs to rewrite parts of the environment is unique, the actual puzzle design is very basic. Most of the solutions are completely obvious, especially for an experienced puzzle gamer like myself.

Need to get from platform A to platform B, but they’re separated by a bottomless pit? Take a photo of a wall and use it to create a bridge. Button needs to be powered by 2 batteries but you’ve only got 1? Take a photo of the battery to create a copy. Exit teleporter is upside down on the ceiling? Take a photo, rotate it 180 degrees and place it on the floor.

Even though you have the freedom to place photos anywhere, the simplest option is usually correct. And there are a couple of ways that the puzzle design prevents the player from doing anything really creative.

Most puzzles give you a limited amount of film, which restricts how many photos you can take (usually 1 to 5 photos per puzzle). Meanwhile, the exit teleporters are usually powered by a switch which is connected by a long wire, and if you break the connection, it won’t work anymore. So you’ll either have to stand in a specific place to ensure that everything you need fits into the photo frame, or place a photo in a specific position to avoid breaking something important.

Later puzzles introduce a few new mechanics. Blue coloured objects are fixed in place, and can’t be copied or overwritten by photos. Cameras which operate on a timer allow the player to take a photo of themselves, which can then be used to place yourself past obstacles. And some cameras destroy what you take a photo of, effectively changing the “copy and paste” mechanic to “cut and paste”.

But because Viewfinder is really short, none of these mechanics are ever explored fully or combined together in really complex puzzles. It only took me 4 hours to complete the main story, and I’ve just got 3 more optional puzzles to solve. This feels like the first half of a really good game.

This is also a rare example of a game that would actually be better without the story. There’s no proper introduction, so I have no idea who the characters are or what they’re actually trying to achieve by solving the puzzles, while the dialogue and voice acting is kind of annoying.

Cobalt Core is a roguelite deckbuilder where the crew of a spaceship are stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop, and must fight against pirates and space monsters while trying to escape.


• Each run uses a Slay The Spire style node layout, including normal fights, elite fights where you can acquire relics, random events, and a shop where you can upgrade or remove cards, or repair your ship’s hull. Also you can choose to attack the shop keeper. I don’t recommend doing that.

• Each turn during combat you’ll draw cards which cost energy to play, and allow you to attack, gain shield, move your ship to another position, or use other special abilities.

• Most attacks fire directly forward from the cannons located on the player’s and the enemy’s ships, which means that movement is a key part of combat. Instead of generating lots of shield to protect against high damage enemy attacks, you could simply avoid them. But you’ll also need to be in a position where your attacks can hit the enemy.

• There are 8 crew members to unlock who each have their own unique cards, and you’ll select 3 crew members for each run, which means there are lots of different tactical combinations to try. Some examples include high damage attacks which generate heat, but if your ship overheats you’ll take hull damage, attacks which can stun enemy weapons to cancel their attacks, and drones which have their own attacks and sit in the middle row between the player and the enemy.

• Power cards and relics provide interesting synergies. For example you could gain extra movement each turn and a free attack every time you move. Or you could combine multistrike cards with increased power for every attack, or the second attack every turn being a stun.

• You can unlock five ships which have different component layouts and other unique abilities.

• There are story scenes featuring amusing dialogue between crew members, while some enemies taunt you before their combat encounters. Its not very detailed, but its more than we usually get in deckbuilders.

• Every time you win a run you can restore some of the crew’s memories of the events which caused the time loop, and you’ll have to win 18 runs to complete the story.

• Each run should be completed in 1 hour or less. It took me 21 hours to finish the story, including a few failed runs on higher difficulties or with crew members whose cards didn’t suit my playing style.

• I didn’t have any problems with bugs or crashes.


• The game suffers from a lack of content which quickly starts to make each run feel repetitive. Each of the game’s three acts only has one boss, which means that you have to fight the same three bosses during every run. Normal/elite enemies and random events repeat quite frequently as well. After completing the story, I don’t really feel the need to continue playing the same thing over and over. Hopefully the developers will add more content to make each run feel more varied.


Cobalt Core is a good deckbuilder which has some interesting combat mechanics and amusing story scenes. You’ll probably have fun completing the story, but it doesn’t have enough content variety for long term replayability.

Having never owned a Playstation, my first experience of The Last of Us was watching the TV show last year. I thought that was excellent, and it convinced me to keep waiting for the broken PC port to be fixed.

After finally playing the game for the first time, I actually think its even better than the show in some ways.


• I’m not going to do a full breakdown of gameplay mechanics because this is a 10 year old game, so I think most players probably already know what to expect.

• There’s a lot more combat in the game, against both Humans and infected. Joel and Ellie are constantly under threat, which makes the world feel even more dangerous.

• Feels similar to survival horror games, with just a few enemies per encounter, but each enemy can be deadly. I was never in danger of running out of ammo, medkits or crafting supplies though.

• Good weapon variety including a few different pistols and rifles, a shotgun, and craftable explosives. Aiming feels good on mouse and keyboard.

• I played on moderate difficulty with permadeath disabled. Human enemies are good at flanking the player, and they can quickly punish you for making a mistake such as missing a shot or moving out of cover at the wrong time.

• Having recently played Resident Evil 4, I really appreciate the fact that Ellie can look after herself in combat, so instead of babysitting her I can focus all my attention on dealing with the enemies.


• Story is excellent and focuses on two very interesting characters.

• Cutscenes are very cinematic and voice acting is outstanding.

• While I think the TV show has the best version of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal (I’ve been a fan of him since Game of Thrones, also Narcos and The Mandalorian), the game has the best version of Ellie. Something about the voice acting by Ashley Johnson (who I also liked in Blindspot) feels less aggressive and more likeable.


• Playing in 1440p, with texture quality set to ultra and shadows on high, graphics look amazing, and I had a stable 60 FPS which felt very smooth. (i7-12700K, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR4)

• I noticed some shader stutter, but it was mostly limited to one chapter (moving through a town with Bill). I had more stutter in that chapter than the entire rest of the game combined.

• For anti-aliasing I recommend using the default setting. I started with DLAA and I noticed three examples of image ghosting on enemies or Joel’s weapons in dark areas. Changing back to default fixed the problem.

• The game only crashed once in 17 hours.


Over the years lots of players have said The Last of Us is a great game, and you can add me to that list now too. Gameplay and story are both excellent.

If, like me, you’ve been waiting for the technical problems of the PC port to be fixed, based on my own experience I would say its safe to play now.

I really hope the developers bring part 2 to PC as well, preferably without needing months of patches to make it actually playable.