Recent reviews by Dooter

“It’s time to mix drinks and change lives” – Jill.

Edit: I would highly implore you to buy this game on Humble Bundle alongside many other games while it's still available till next week or so. The summary of my thoughts can be seen at the bottom of my "review"

Plot:
Without any spoilers Va-11 hall-a is a “game” that puts you into the perspective of a female protagonist simply named Jill. You’re a bartender in a bar named Va-11 Hall-a in a cyberpunk dystopian world. Va-11 hall-a is much less of a game as it is an experience and it is primarily a Visual Novel over anything else.

Va-11 Hall-a’s plot takes a much more realistic approach considering their situation. The game’s plot is where the game shines and the more you’re into it, the better. Va-11 Hall-a’s plot is primarily about dealing with life. Not the life of a super hero, a life of a super villain. This is you experiencing an average life considering the world the characters are living in. Which is what I love about this game.
Va-11 Hall-a’s story is one where you meet a variety of different characters who each have their own problems, usually talking them out with you while also having your own set of problems that need to be dealt with, like paying rent or some more serious personal problems.

I think one of Va-11 Hall-a’s greatest strengths is that you can’t twist the grand scheme of things, you can’t stop a bank robbery from happening or a huge turf war from not causing collateral damage. You can’t, you can however, help change the lives of close people that were seriously affected by the events themselves. This game shows you how people from different walks of life deal with grief, stress, pressure and many other things and how although you can’t ultimately make things work how they did before and reverse major events, you can try to help make things work as they are now.
Characters:
All the characters were really interesting and none of them really stood out way more than the others. Sure there are characters that have much less development and much less screen time than the others but the main side characters do shine equally and it was and still really is difficult in finding a true favourite. An extra positive in the game would also be how Jill, our main character isn’t some boring, bland main character that we usually get. She herself has great character development and is relatable enough being the most “normal” out of them although she is a bisexual

The characters also feel real, none of them have any ham fisted plot forced into them, instead, they all feel like characters that are relatable to some extent and varying to person to person and even things like their sexual preferences are given out in a so to speak normal condition.

Now that is to say that the plot of the game isn’t flawless. There are some side mysteries that ultimately never get concluded but they aren’t too huge. They feel like stuff that you want to know but don’t exactly need to know. Hopefully means that the company does want to make a second game for this series.

The game also really only makes you have choices by the drinks you make, you can’t exactly ask them this specific question or that one, your only real choices are what and what not to serve a customer.

Gameplay:

Huge warning to anyone that is expecting any real gameplay that’s truly engaging, fun and interesting you are not going to like this game one bit. This is primarily a visual novel and the less you are interested in story-centric games the faster you will drop this game.

The gameplay is fairly basic but the gameplay also heavily relies on your interest in the story and your memory for some specific occasions. Meaning, the less you are interested in the story, the less likely you will care about this game’s just enough gameplay.

Now in the gameplay department this game obviously lacks, there really isn’t much for you to do asides from clicking left mouse button over and over until the person you’re talking to asks you for a drink. You can also buy stuff for your apartment which is also a plus. I guess.

Even so, the gameplay, again, heavily relies on your interest in the story. The less and less you’re interested in the story, the faster you will realise the gameplay does get repetitive. Which is really the game’s only flaw, it can feel repetitive as you get further into the game but since I personally was engaged and intrigued by the story I managed to one sit the entire game in one day and never really felt like “omg stop I just need a break”. So if you’re not a person that’s a fan of things like Visual Novels do not, by any means buy this game.
The way I see it, when and if you end up getting interested into the story you don’t just make a drink, you’re making a drink for a friend that you care about which kinda helped me continue on and disregard the game’s repetitiveness.

The game’s world is also built through looking at Jill’s tablet/phone(?) at her apartment, you won’t exactly find out how this or that works or how this entire organisation’s infrastructure works but you get a small gist of everything here and there.
Music:
The music is fairly interesting which features a more techno type soundtrack which ranges from emotional type of music to energetic up beat ones. I however, could not get myself to fall in love with the music at all. I tried to listen to the game’s OST in multiple occasions, sitting down and relaxing, working and heck, I even tried to listen to some of it while typing this review out. I just couldn’t really say I loved it, there are some nice songs but none of them truly felt iconic or really stood out. I feel like this is due to how when you’re playing the game you can select your music so when you’re listening to this girl talking about how she’s completely stressed out about her family you might possibly end up listening to the same song when another girl is fan girling about a singer. Which means that there was no iconic music.

When you’ve played Undertale and you listen to a piece of music from that game after a month or so you will remember where that piece of music is taken from and who you fought. In Va-11 hall-a… I just couldn’t really get myself to fall in love with the music, most of the down beat music has the same vibe and feel to them. No, I’m not saying this song is just an alternate version of that one, I just felt like they were too “samey” in terms of feel.

Now I guess a good comparison would be Doom 2016’s OST. Pretty much the music that plays through the game is just pure rock and heavy metal but each piece truly feels unique from one another. I can’t really say the same about Va-11 Hall-a’s OST.
Summary:
This game is aimed towards more people that just want to chill and read/watch a visual novel more than play a game. You will be severely disappointed if you’re expecting an actual game with fun filled content and not want a story.

If you’re a fan of VNs or just want a different story based game experience than I would highly recommend this game if it goes on sale and as of time of typing this review Va-11 Hall-a is packaged with Humble Bundle right now for 10$ alongside many other great games and I implore you to get the 10$ bundle just for this game. In fact, I bought the bundle primarily just to give the key to one of my friends.

I would highly recommend this game IF you know what type of game you’re getting into and if a VN about being a bartender in a cyberpunk dystopian world interests you. You should get it.

If it's true they primarily made the RB games for this than I'd say it's worth it.

They actually updated there screenshots for the Steam page for once.

Story wise, this game is much darker than RB3, RB1 and MegaDimension. It's a nice introductory chapter into the main dimension and serves as the introduction chapter to the little sisters of the CPUs, them being the CPU candidates. It's honestly skippable but if it's on sale and you have the money, why not get it considering how one of the main antagonists constantly gets brought up in future conversations in different games on occasion.

P.S, my "reviews" for Nep games before MegaDimension will solely be based on the story.

Doom 2016 is arguably one of the best games to come out this year, it's not the best but it is definitely one of the better games to come out of 2016.

Pros:

+ Constant sales.
Do yourself a favor, you should definitely get this game once it goes on sale, considering how id/Bethesda is being really generous with this game and the constant 50% off sales I'd definitely recommend picking this up when it's on sale.

+ Fast paced
I honestly had a lot of trouble playing other games like Overwatch once I finished having a pretty strong marathon with Doom, the movement of other games just felt way too slow so you may or may not experience a hang over if you try to play this game through long sessions and then trying to switch to other games.

+ Solid shooting
All the guns feel viable and the situations and how you handle them is usually let up to you.

+ Interesting lore
The game lacks a story, which is fine, this is DOOM. Not Last of Us. However, the lore in the game is actually really rich if you bother searching for the records that are spread throughout the game.

+ Music
The music in this game is really great and gets you into the mood of killing more and more demons.

+ Optimisation on PC is surprisingly good considering how badly PC ports have been handled lately. >_> Watching you NMS, Deus Ex.

Mixed:
~ Death match was finally added into the MP and id has taken over the Multiplayer aspect as well. We're supposedly gonna be getting bots sometime later but unfortunately this stuff wasn't here at launch.

~ An arguable problem with the game is how the levels are layed out and this may or may not make the game feel too repetitive depending on the player. The usual formula is travel here > Get locked down inside room > Kill demons > Room is unlocked > repeat. This can make the game feel too repetitive if you're not too into it and compared to the old Doom games, you could find and hunt all demons or you could just run through them and only deal with the ones in your way.

~ Multiplayer. The Multiplayer was handed off to Certain Affinity, the people that did Halo MP so id themselves had no handling over the multiplayer until after the game was released. It's not bad, it's not great, it's just, okay.


Negatives:
- Multiplayer DLC
my only gripe with this game is that I can't seem to connect with anyone in the MP and the fact that id/Bethesda seem focused on adding Multiplayer DLC only to the bag to a game that's already dead. I've tried, 5 minutes sitting in the MP screen and I couldn't get a single soul.

Down below is my actual review but for this mini section it'll just be me having a mini rant.
Oh Fallout 4 oh how I was unironically very anxious to explore you again after upgrading from an i5 3300, 8GB Ram, 7750 1GB HD GPU from a 7700HQ, 1070, 16GB Ram and 256GB SSD... and how sorely disappointed I was after less than 10 hours.

I personally gave this game a thumbs up before I actually upgraded to something that you can consider high-mid end because I thought, well. My desktop isn't even that good so I can't really say ♥♥♥♥ about performance but after upgrading... I'm severely disappointed in this game. The game just well, straight up runs very poorly on my hardly capable of maintaining above 60 on well anything not Low presets. After initially playing it in Ultra for a couple hours and not getting very good framerates I just thought "well maybe my CPU's bottlenecking". Turn it down to High-med settings and still struggled to maintain above 50 once I got into Boston, hell even getting down to the low 30s. Some places just struggled at 25FPS for reasons???? After deciding to mod the game with tons of performance tweaks, F4SE, ini configs, etc etc. I started playing it at Medium I was somewhat capable of maintaining "playable" framerates but I still got below average performance in certain areas.

After a ton of framerate drops, etc etc in downtown Boston I just thought "well, I'm done with this game". I honestly just couldn't bother anymore with the piss poor performance. Before any of you dumbasses go "It'S YoUr PeCee dUm DuM!". Please piss off.

I can average 80FPS in GTA V at High-Ultra settings with a dozen police trying to shoot me while me trying to shoot them back with rocket launchers.

Played the entirety of Witcher 3 at High preset (Hairworks disabled) and I was capable of maintaining above 80FPS, even averaging 100+ in woodlands and the lowest being around the high 40s.

There's honestly absolutely no reason Fallout 4 should be performing this terribly at all considering my performance in other games.

tl;dr:
If you haven't gotten the game yet, don't bother. This is honestly a very passable game and you're debatably better off getting New Vegas and modding it heavily, a Farcry or Borderlands title too.





Fallout 4. Definitely worthy to be nominated for GOTY. It's also definitely a great game but one thing that it isn't is an RPG which is what Fallout games have always been considered since the first and has been even when Bethesda took control of it, to some extent.

If you were one of the Fallout RPG lovers that has played the series since the first one than you will be severely disappointed with Fallout 4 as it is moreso a FPS Open World Explorer with RPG elements. (It's not a FPS RPG Shooter, in its current state that is. The devs are currently working on a Survival Mode which will be similar to Fallout New Vegas' Hardcore mode mixed with the Project Nevada preset with a few surprises here and there, though that's not in yet)

This game has completely watered down the dialogue being similar to games like Mass Effect. In my personal opinion, it's not the lack of options that really matters to me, it's how in the end of the quest/story you will always have the same outcome regardless of what you say or do. There are only a few instances where there's a significant change but for the most part, you can say something nice or be a downright asshat to someone but the outcome will be the same.

The karma system has been removed and the only thing that really effects what you wanna say is your companions where your actions will effect their opinion on you as time goes. *Wears power armor* "Danse <3 dat". Even so if you didn't like having a companion and truly wanted to be a lone wanderer you could pretty much do everything with little to no second thoughts.

Oh and guess what? You know those snippets you saw in the trailers? Yeah, some scenes are reused in the ending and this game had an ending worse than Fallout 3. It's like a "end of the beginning" type of ending and no matter how you end it, the only difference is the NPCs that you talk to in the end. That's it. At least if you were a jackass in Fallout 3 there were significant differences if you were a saint.

If you played any Borderlands this is pretty much a visually more realistic one, enemy loot, skill tree, etc.
So, as a Fallout game, this is not close to one. End of the review if you're looking for a Fallout RPG and you should definitely not get it till it has a significant price drop.

If you liked Borderlands you are more than likely to love Fallout 4.

Now as a game, I really liked it despite the flaws stated above. The exploration was just really good and wish I could have a significantly better graphics card to enjoy the view. Gun play was definitely improved from Fallout 3 and New Vegas, each gun feels different and each gun felt viable. Surprise! In Fallout 3/NV shooting was definitely a problem but in this VATS felt like a huge hindrance as shots I knew I could hit actually ended up missing for the most part. VATS felt kinda gimmicky and more like to add a "badass" effect to your playthrough. Except for when you melee, vats was still definitely viable when using melee and only when using melee.

A huge missed opportunity to me is the vertibird we all wanted to ride ever since we saw the first trailer. Sadly, it is a huge gimmick. Here's the problem with it, it's slow, you can't really do much with it AND you can only travel to places you have ALREADY explored. So no, you can't send it to unexplored places or custom waypoints making it what I feel is a huge wasted opportunity, heck, just let us call reinforcements or ask for air support.

The game feels somewhat livelier than the previous ones NV/3 and you could usually find action every 2-5 minutes which is kinda cool and I like how random NPCs can activate quests for you.

Music. Sadly they reused the entire Fallout 3 sound track and added a few new songs which feels kinda cheap for a game that had supposedly years of development so there really isn't much to say about it. Oh yeah, the radio guy is meh, need Three Dog.

Now the story, it's nothing special, it's interesting enough to keep you in touch but there are a few problems. There's a certain area that you can only access when you reach that area in the quest line. It's impossible to visit without cheats in game. The door to it is boarded up. I do not mind things like locked doors, locked gates etc. but simply boarding it up if you happen to explore it earlier in the game than magically appearing later is dumb.

If you've played FO3 you know what synths are and the game focuses on them and a quick breakdown of what goes on without getting to deep into spoilers. Synths are synthetic robots meant to secretly replace real humans. The thing I don't get is if the people behind them are that smart why couldn't they just make new humans with new physical appearances and see how well they blend in the real world. Oh right, cause than the game would have zero story. Yes there has been a time when the institute actually did work on the surface but mutual distrust made them go silent.

Visuals, this game is certainly no Division or Battlefront but they are definitely good enough to be Next Gen. They definitely have an improvement from Fallout 3 and NV, people who say otherwise are obviously still on a desktop using Windows XP and hardly made it to the launcher.

There's my so to speak review of the game, if you liked Borderlands or Farcry you'll most likely like Fallout 4.