Recent reviews by Zaphod

At least as fun as the first game, more-so in many ways. Pretty much an improvement over the original (which I also absolutely loved) in nearly every way.

A fascinating story with great characters, gameplay is super fun, and gorgeous graphics!

Changing my review back to "thumbs up" once again. I initially recommended this because I could tell it's just a great game despite the performance issues. Playing in 4k with a 4090 and 13900k.

And then a few hours into the game, the real problems started. It became an utter crashfest for me. I couldn't go more than a few minutes or even seconds in the game without it crashing. I tried every fix in the book - multiple drivers, validating integrity of files, uninstalling/reinstalling the game, and at least a dozen other "fixes" I found online, none of which worked. I even abandoned my save file and started over, thinking maybe my save had become corrupted. But I got exactly the same results - it worked fine for the first few hours then became completely unplayable. At some point in this process I changed my review to thumbs down.

But now at this point (after patch 5), it mostly works fine. I still have to turn off ray tracing when on the planet Jedha (that planet was always the worst offender for me at least). It could still be optimized further, and the devs need to fix ray tracing on Jedha, but it rarely crashes for me anymore as long as I turn ray tracing off on that one planet. Given how fun the game is, this is an acceptable cost (if still not ideal obviously), for me at least. I hope they continue to refine and polish the performance issues, though.

A great game and a great remake. Might need a beefy pc to run it on, though. It's gorgeous, fun, has great characters, and is an all around good time.

For people who loved The Witness. Also for people who hated The Witness.

Not for people who haven't played The Witness.

Too glitchy, locked to 60fps, and BAD fps stutters. I initially bought it and almost immediately got a refund because the game was a damn mess - couldn't even get an xbox controller to work. The devs fixed that at least, and when I heard about that and some alleged fixes to the stuttering problems, I re-bought the game. I can tell that it would be a lot of fun if it worked properly, but the fact is that at this stage, it does not. I have very nice hardware - a 3080 Ti GPU and a 10700k CPU, and it might run fine for five minutes or so, but then I get really bad stutters happening every few seconds. It's absolutely unforgivable that a game based around such hard core split-second reflexes has constant stutters that can last close to a second - plenty of time to get you killed very quickly.

I've tried various fixes I found online, but none of them have worked for me. It's a travesty that the game has been almost a month and still doesn't work for ♥♥♥♥ on a pc. It's also pretty dumb that fps is locked to 60 and thus can't go beyond that, although I suspect that has to do with the MAJOR performance problems the game experiences as is. It's some truly bad coding. The graphics are pretty and all, but they're not on par with other AAA games that are much more demanding and that I can get around 120 fps in 4k with maxed graphics settings. It makes no sense that fps is locked to 60 and that the game has performance problems that are this bad.

When the devs fix these problems, I'll revisit this review, as I can tell that the game *theoretically* would be a lot of fun, but it's mostly just frustrating at the moment due to the stuttering.

Basically the old-school final fantasy games (for nintendo and super nintendo before sony got ahold of them) with way better graphics. The story is pretty cheezy, but the gameplay and job system is fun. If you (like me) are looking for a nostalgic experience and enjoy turn-based RPG's, I'd definitely recommend it. It brought back a lot of memories from when I was a kid and played (and loved) those games. If you're looking for a good story, though, look elsewhere.

My favorite 4X game, especially among space-themed ones. It is computer-driven space crack. You will sit down to play and in what feels like the blink of an eye realize you haven't eaten in eight hours.

This game has come a LONG way since it first came out. I bought it basically on release day and remember playing at least a dozen games where I thought I had picked up the mechanics only to realize at some point that I had been doing it completely wrong the whole time. I'd start a new game, get a little further, and the same thing would happen. Except none of that bothered me in the least. The learning process itself was a lot of fun, even though I would only play a round until I had some kind of epiphany about how it works and then start over. And over. And over.

Having said that, the game had some pretty major flaws in the beginning. I remember leaving lots of feedback on the forums because it always felt like the game could be really awesome but that it wasn't quite living up to its potential. These days, it feels like it's the game I always thought it could be. The devs have kept refining it over the years, and it's a truly awesome game, although I'm sure it could be overwhelming to new players. I recommend having a second monitor ready to google the ♥♥♥♥ out stuff as you go, as the mechanics and strategies can be pretty involved.

It allows for a wide variety of different playstyles. You can play as pacifist religious nuts or warmongering materialists; egalitarian hippies, or fascist slavers; lots of different combinations of ethics, racial traits, government types, etc. You can even play as robots or a unified hive mind. Lots of options available for what kind of stuff shows up in the game as well, and a healthy modding community.

My biggest gripe is one that is as old as the game: the stupid, stupid AI. It's not as stupid as it used to be (which was at least three or four stupids), but it still has a lot of room to grow. You'll take over planets that seem like they were built by someone making decisions based on throwing darts at a dartboard and will often have to remake them so they're not ridiculous. Having said that, the AI has come a long way, and Paradox has people continuing to work on improving it.

Some expansions are better than others. I'd probably either get them on sale or as some kind of package deal or whatnot. I have all of them except Nemesis and Distant Stars, as there seemed to be either major problems or lack of value with those two in particular.

While I love this game, I was very tempted to give it a thumbs down due to the one and only thing about it that I don't like. It's a criticism that may seem small at first, except that it extremely limits the replayability of the game:

You can't skip cutscenes.

Not even in New Game Plus mode.

Not even with mods...

If the devs added this one very simple feature, I'd call this a perfect game, but they completely trashed its replayability through their decision not to do this, and if you can't enjoy multiple replays of a metroidvania, then the devs kind of missed the boat in this respect, especially since one of the best features of metroidvania games is their replayability.

A more detailed review:

I loved everything about this game (at least on the first playthrough or two). It's both a 3D metroidvania and a Star Wars game it their finest. The gameplay is very fun, and it also has what I consider to be a great story with great characters. Your friendly neighborhood droid (BD-1) is probably my favorite droid in Star Wars. The graphics are also gorgeous (although no ray tracing or DLSS unfortunately), and the music is great Starwarsy music. The map takes a little getting used to, but it's pretty well done, allowing you to track whether you've fully explored a given "room" and found all there is to find there, which is a nice feature for a metroidvania, where you're constantly unlocking stuff, backtracking to get more stuff that you can get now that you unlocked the previous stuff, etc. There are about half a dozen different planets that you go to, and being able to customize your lightsaber is a nice touch.

After you beat the game, you can start it anew with New Game Plus, where you keep all your unlocked aesthetic items/skins but have to re-acquire actual upgrades. This is where I started to find the cutscenes annoying. While I like the story and don't mind seeing it a couple of times, there are probably hours of cutscenes in this game, and you will probably find yourself watching youtube or something during them because you can't skip them, even on New Game Plus mode. Not being able to skip them severely detracts from the game's replayability because there are so many of them, and many of them are pretty long. I'm kind of flabbergasted as to why the devs won't let you do this, at least on subsequent playthroughs. You can't even do it with mods...

I've played this game three or four times and would love to play it several more times and try to speedrun it etc., but it gets pretty tedious due to the unskippable cutscenes. So yeah, the game is great, and I couldn't bring myself to downvote it for that reason, even though the devs have basically utterly trashed its replayability since even if you want to play the game a dozen times, you won't because you won't want to be forced to watch the cutscenes a dozen times. A REALLY simple problem to fix, if the devs had decided to, but they didn't.

Loved it! Weird-assed trippy Black Mirror Twilight Zone story totally sucked me in. I also enjoyed the gameplay immensely.

9/10

One of the best open world games I've ever played. The gameplay is really fun, and depending on the difficulty level (which you can change at any time while playing), can require a great deal of strategy, or none at all if you just want to run around killing robo-dinos and exploring the story. As for the story itself, I found it to be really great as well and enjoyed unraveling the mystery at every step of the way.

The aesthetics and music are also gorgeous - I only wish it had ray tracing and dlss.

My only gripe with this game is that there is a known issue involving the sound cutting out for cutscenes sometimes. None of the fixes I found worked for me - my sound settings were all set up properly, and most of the cutscenes worked fine, but then I'd hit some (especially some of the REALLY important ones at the end, including the final one) that I just couldn't get to work at all - tried saving/reloading/changing settings/changing output device/restarting pc/etc.... eventually just had to rely on subtitles. For such a great story, it really sucked to not be able to hear anything for so many cutscenes.

Anyway, I'd give this game a 10/10 if not for the sound problems.

It also gave me some trouble with my multi-monitor setup. I have 4 monitors (admittedly excessive... I have a problem), and my main one is an LG CX48, which is a 4k OLED. I'm not sure if the problem was that it wouldn't play well with the LG, or with the multiple displays, but the monitor that the game would pop up on when I'd start the game appeared to be pretty random, and it would often set the refresh rate of my CX48 to 24fps for some reason. My workaround was just that after I started the game, if it displayed on the wrong monitor I had to figure out which random number it had assigned to my CX48, switch the game to that monitor, make sure the refresh rate was set properly, and then turn on HDR... essentially 3 out of 4 times I'd start the game. That was annoying, but it was at least a functioning workaround.