Recent reviews by Apex

Tried Grim dawn, couldnt beat it. Tried last epoch, refunded it. D4? Never giving blizzard money again. This? Brother this is the first game since elden ring that keeps me playing hours on end, and I play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ class in the game (allegedly) (warrior). Buy it or wait, either way it's a banger.

Oh I know what you're thinking- A negative review? On an otherwise loved game?
Yeah dude, I'm not looking at this thru any nostalgia for the first game or letting major gameplay incidents that I've run into slide- Idk why others are.
My first issue: Pack of rats spawn in this little side location you can discover- okay. You can kill them with grenades. Fine. However, prior to learning this, I just ran away and climbed up a ladder, and escaped the rats. Continue exploring, random pack of rats spawn randomly up my ass as if it's the same pack that was chasing me still aggro'd from underground- I realize this may be a new rat spawn, but it was near-ish to the OG spot that it made me think the original rats are still aggro'd and just following me via teleportation-

No AI living NPC whatever- It's coming- It's fine.

Enemy spawns: What. Is. This.
What is this.
I cannot tell if I am in a location I can fully explore or not because of 2-10 enemies just randomly appearing RIGHT INFRONT OF YOU. I get an achievement- Kill a whole camp without anyone raising the alarm. Okay, epic. Move 5 feet, MORE ENEMIES SPAWN ALL OVER THE CAMP. LIKE BRO.
I cannot tell if some locations are locked behind quests or not. It's open world so I want to explore- Maybe I should just follow the main quest?
Either way, something SUPER ♥♥♥♥♥ is happening in the current build with enemy spawns. They either spawn out of nowhere or seem super buggy, you'll clear an area only to be leaving it and get insta gibbed by some rando that didn't exist 3 seconds ago.
Very positive? Like yeah it feels good to play until you get into any gameplay engagements-
Also, depending on what time of day theres some weird buggy lighting/shadow glitching occurring throughout different areas.
But the spawning system feels like I'm straight playing blackops 6 nuketown.
I will change this review after some patches but right now I don't even want to play it and waste my time clearing camps I may or may not supposed to be clearing for ♥♥♥♥ to spawn and respawn out of nowhere.
I shouldn't be questioning if I am wasting my time while playing a game.

Look, I'm glad it exists.
I'll try to keep this brief:
One: Literally everyone in this game is gay unless it's diamond, lucas, or max if you choose to make her straight. Like there's characters I thought were straight until they were telling me how hot my fat black friend is and how they'd pound his chunky booty.
Two: I ate a bunch of edibles as I played through this, still can't tell you why diamond was mad at me towards the end
Three: Inconsequential story, cliff hanger ending 'Max Caulfield will return'
Little dumbfounded to wait this long for a sequel only to... have to wait longer to see where this story goes. I couldn't even tell you what happened thru most of it, but maybe that's the edibles.
Oh, there's like, 5 locations in the game, if that. You can probably see every area in the screen shots. No town exploration or anything.
Idk man. I recommend it but at a sale price. Got really wild towards the end but for no reason seemed like.

the game is fine, i like it a lot. however:
on hard, some of the riddles are pretty absurd. for instance, *minor spoilers of one puzzle*: the moth puzzle, you look at moth wings and count the symbols to do some math. Some of the moths have ripped/torn wings, so I thought you just double the amount of symbols to make up for the wingless side- an hour later thinking i was going crazy, looked it up and you just count the symbols you see, not that *would* be on the entire moth if it had its whole other wing. Stuff like this.
Another thing is the combat. It's fine but sometimes james will just whiff miss after miss in melee, perhaps manual melee aiming would remedy this.
Finally, in some boss fights (again on hard) there are instances where dodging feels awful, and rushing to loot the boss arena itself can be finnicky because even when you're right infront of an item with a boss up your ass, you wont have the white 'interact' dot appear so you can pick up the item. Perhaps something like the old games where you can vicinity pick up items and doors, long as it doesn't allow you to clip through them.
Outside of that, it's great. Maybe hard combat and hard puzzles isn't the best for a first playthrough though, feels a bit unbalanced in some areas.

started playing
episode 1 - fine, this could be interesting
episode 2 - fine, this could be interesting
episode 3 - alright, fine, I guess
episode 4 - alright, pretty tedious.. annd.. that ending.
episode 5 - not beaten yet but the start made me absolutely laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity of the dialogue "did you get the C4 from your army buddies?" i mean tell me you weren't in the military without telling me xd
UPDATE:
completed episode 5. I think episode 5 made me hate this game, I'm not gonna lie. gonna keep a positive review, but this just really went off the rails as a tumblr-esque power fantasy.

I would not say this was scary at all. if you're looking for something to test your limits, it ain't here.

this game would be great without the absolutely cheese mode boss/ mini boss enemy scenarios where in which you HAVE to die repeatedly to learn a pattern. Like, there isnt the dark souls/elden ring level of 'oh okay this is what the boss does and so this is what i must do'
it's more of a 'memorize this boss or get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ moron'


i'm on probably one of the easiest bosses in the game, probably 6 cubes just rolling over in a pattern and it is the most frustrating time waste of a ♥♥♥♥ stain i've ever seen. I don't FEEL like i've done anything wrong in my 5 hours fighting the boss, I just happen to turn around and see a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cube rolling on top of me because I can't juggle six ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cubes rolling around the map at a time. It's stupid. It's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid.

UPDATE
okay see, its ♥♥♥♥ like this. it is ♥♥♥♥ like this. mantagora. a boss that is not hostile and it flies around a huge skybox and avoids fighting you. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 70 minutes of running around this stupid ass map guessing where the ♥♥♥♥ the boss is, because it 'disappears and reappears', you cannot follow it because it despawns and respawns depending where the player is on the map. 70 minutes of chasing this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moron and on my 23rd lap of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map and i die from falling off the map.
so much tedious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in an otherwise great game, just let me fight the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss dude, why the hell do i have to chase this ♥♥♥♥♥ down when it doesnt even follow the laws of nature. it's an atrocious time waste like a bunch of the other content in the game. just make ♥♥♥♥ not tedious and not a time waste. how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard is it.

literally turn global illumination and reflective lighting to medium, it says at high it enables ray tracing and that should fix your potato performance.
this game is great so far. It's freakin sick.

S tier game.
Just finished my first reagent release (escaped the experiment) at 21 hours. Coulda been sooner but I've really enjoyed my time just match making with randoms and breezing thru these trials. If you like survival horror games this is just. The absolute apex (hah) of multiplayer survival horror. DBD has NOTHING on this game. AI enemy almost makes it more fun.
It can be RNG 'wtf' at times but they are understandable, most of the time.
There are enemies that make noises akin to a witch in L4D, but they stay in one spot and if you make too much noise they scream and stun you- These enemies are easily the most BS in the game, but like I said, you are able to hear them beforehand.

I do have one complaint, and that's the escaping the facility rewards. I thought it was gonna give me perk upgrade tickets, some cosmetics, SOMETHING, all the other missions in the game give you rewards, why the hell does the SOLO ESCAPE MISSION NOT GIVE YOU ANYTHING? WHATS THE POINT???





i mean it's just still a great game.

Good so far, only issue I have is no FOV slider.

*updated review*

Playing on i9-9900k and a 3080.
Launch day performance was a mess, enuff said. patch seems to have fixed the stutter, don't know why it didn't ship with this patch, dunno how that passed QA- but i digress.

The callisto protocol is.. Mediocre. The combat and exploration are it's weakest points, while the graphics and the story (so far) are it's high lights. Before I continue, I recommend getting this on sale.

Combat: The game doesn't follow it's own rules. I'm playing on maximum security which is the max difficulty. This game isn't hard, what's hard is that the game doesn't do what it's told. I can't tell you how many spike walls I've thrown enemies into that they just bounce off.

Or the grip battery saying I have 4 bars, then I grip an enemy or explosive tank only to instantly drop it because i don't have any grip battery.

These are issues, because the game is almost like hotline miami, in that if you ♥♥♥♥ up a fight, you're dead. What I mean by this is, no amount of marksmanship is going to save you such as in dead space. Enemies mostly ignore bullets and track you like a homing missile. Most encounters are 4-6 enemies at a time, forcing you to use the spike walls or explosive tanks- But I'm telling you, if you grip one and throw him into the wall and he doesn't die, you might as well get ready to see one of the gory animated death scenes for the 20th time in a row. You literally just die until RNG works in your favor, it feels like. Every encounter, it's like 'okay how am I gonna cheese this room'.

Branching paths? They amount to 'go this way to continue the game, go this way to hit a loot room and comeout somewhere on the main path again'. There's usually only 2 ways to go, and the optional one always puts you back on the main path. Linear game.

Kinda jumbled review but essentially, imagine dead space with good graphics, but focused on melee combat and enemy ganks. It's not scary. It's tedious as all hell. I legit feel like I'm playing dead space but combat was designed by the guys that made hotline miami, the game forces you to play like a chump. It's like the order 1886. It's not horrible but some of these encounters- sometimes dodges don't work, sometimes your grip throw doesn't work, sometimes enemies slide across the floor to hit you in the head-
It's just tedious.
The tedious protocol.
Not very survival horror.

Oh and they reuse this cheap tentacle head monster about 48 different times, that launches out of nowhere and makes you do a QTE. Same with the small bug leech things.
Doing loot room and then dropping a manual save doesn't keep the loot, means if you do a loot room and die you gotta redo the loot path. And everything in this game requires you to slowly shimmy or slowly crawl thru a vent. It's tedious.

*update*
currently at the third re-use of the first "boss". one hit kill. hold down A or D. shoot. repeat. for the 57th time in a row.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ devs.
just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
god of war 2016 had the same miniboss over and over but it wasn't like this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

UPDATE AGAIN

ON FINAL BOSS
DUDE HAS A SPAMMABLE RANGED ATTACK WITH A SOUND QUE AND INSTANT START UP *BWUAHHHHH* *BWUAHHHH* *BWUAHHHH* SO FUN HAHAH SO FUN

this game is ♥♥♥♥ and not because it's "hard" it's ♥♥♥♥ because it's cheap as ♥♥♥♥ and doesn't let you use the games mechanics as intended, or it spams enemies. It's either or and this final boss fight shenanigans is the most demoralizing $60 i've ever spent. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ game.