The last game you completed, and rating.

Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart: 8/10

This probably deserves a 9 but it's a short game and for £50 I don't feel the value is there. There is a new game+ that offers some extra unlockables but I didn't feel all that compelled to go back to it.

That said, this game is utterly charming - great characters and voice work, spectacular animation and visuals and some genuinely impressive set pieces - it's a very pretty, fast-paced roller-coaster ride that kept me smiling all the way through.

It still needs some patches I think to really finish polishing it, but for the most part I didn't encounter any issues. There are some annoying moments when you can clip through scenery and get stuck in geometry that really shouldn't be there but you can manually save whenever you want so it's not really that big a deal.

Controls felt a little off for me on an XBox pad - flight controls for one segment of the game were just plain weird and I had to remap them - also some alt fires for weapons didn't seem to work the way the game thinks they should (due to this originally being designed around a dual-sense controller no doubt).

Overall, I recommend it - great fun, great story, dazzling visuals - maybe wait to get it for £25-£30 though.
 
After finally burning out on Fallout 76, I played through Dead Island 2 over the last week.

Found it kind of like a paint-by-numbers zombie game. All very familiar, all very run of the mill. It looked and ran nicely, but it broke absolutely no new ground at all. Everything is imported from other games in the same or similar genres. The story and side quests are straight out of the big book of zombie game cliches and fetch quests.

The question that remains is, 'how much fun can it make beating up zombies over and over again?' Fun enough to keep it going for 15-20 hours, I found. It was just wearing a bit thin around that amount of game time when, hey presto, it turned out I was at the end of the main story anyway, so I guess it got the pacing right.

A creamy middle of a 6.5/10 game, says I.
 
Tell Me Why. 7/10. The attention to detail is pretty incredible for a small studio to produce and great visuals. It's a bit in your face with the story aspects but that seems to be the way they roll.
 
NFS Unbound. 6/10 For the story mode. The story mode is a pain with the days, nights and qualifier rounds. The story line is what you expect from a NFS game and the cartoon style grows on you. The animations are not as intrusive as advertised if you go for subtle colours but it can be big and bright if you want it to be.
Online mode. 3/10. Ramming is encouraged and the tuning balance is way off. There is always 1 car in each class that is nearly 5 seconds faster on a good clean run. It gets boring quickly with constant repeat races of the same routes and it is quite a grind fest.
There is a bug on the pc that when your in the tuning menu and a public race invite pops you have to come all the way out of the menu to press the decline race button, your meant to be able to cancel in any menu.
One other bug to note, if you don't have the steam version and you don't have an XBox controller then forget playing. The bug causes the controls to be mapped in a way that you can't use the controller. You have to add the EA App and the game exe as non Steam games. Make sure you close the EA App in the background before launching it in steam.
 
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ne0 said:
The Witcher 3
Hearts of Stone
Blood and Wine

I've actually completed the main game 3 times now, once on PS4 and twice on PC. Most recently played through the entire main game plus both DLC's with next gen upgrades.

All I can say is that WOW. I mean this game plus it's DLC's are just unbelievably amazing, I don't even know how to describe it.

When you play this, including the 2 DLC's it's very easy to understand how badly CDPR dropped the ball with Cyberpunk.

IMHO Blood and Wine is one of the most top tier gaming experiences and is even better than the main game. So is Hearts of Stone. CDPR were in the form of their lives with this. The level of care and attention to detail that went into this whole package is just incredible. Gaming doesn't get any better imo.

10/10
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I've yet to complete Blood & Wine. I went back to it a couple of times after a long gap and felt like I needed to start the game from scratch to remember all the RPG mechanics so didn't bother. I'm now doing a new playthrough from the start with the upgraded visuals. Really embracing the "correct" lore after the mess that was season 3 on Netflix! It's funny how, back in 2016 my set-up allowed me to play the game at max graphics in the mid 50s for FPS (probably with a Vega 64). With the new graphical upgrade, I'm getting similar performance which, I'm absolutely fine with. Anything above late 40s for this type of game is fine for me. Especially looking forward to getting to Blood and Wine now after reading your endorsement!!
 
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 8/10

One of those remakes you spend the whole time grinning through but it's not without its flaws. While I actually enjoy the change in direction with the story it is very modern Square Enix in its approach. I think it blew it's Sephiroth load way too early as the reveal in the original was way better imo. The whole Shinra sequence was a bit disappointing in the end too, it was way longer while feeling much less substantial and the changes to how it played out were a downgrade.

The combat was fun enough but ended up feeling quite samey after a while. I'd generally use the same handful of abilities and spells while ignoring the rest though maybe that would change in hard mode. The boss fights felt way too drawn out too but outside of a couple of fights that required you to play in a certain way I didn't have much trouble with any of them.

Easily the worst part of the game though was the padding. Shimmy through here, crawl through there, slowly traverse those monkey bars, do these little pointless mini puzzles, forced walking and jogging etc. The game could have easily been 10 hours shorter and I'd have enjoyed the game just as much if not more. The sidequest sections of the game dragged the story to a halt as well despite being enjoyable enough to complete. I thoroughly enjoyed the way they expanded the world and sections of the story but some of them were expanded way too much.

Overall it's beautiful, I've never liked the characters more and I'm excited to see where the story and gameplay goes from here. If you liked the original you'll probably like this too.
 
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Uncharted 4 - 9/10

One of my favourite in the series.

Graphics and production values some of the best I've seen and still one of the best looking games out there on PC maxed out.

ND in their prime :)
 
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Moothead2 said:
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 8/10

One of those remakes you spend the whole time grinning through but it's not without its flaws. While I actually enjoy the change in direction with the story it is very modern Square Enix in its approach. I think it blew it's Sephiroth load way too early as the reveal in the original was way better imo. The whole Shinra sequence was a bit disappointing in the end too, it was way longer while feeling much less substantial and the changes to how it played out were a downgrade.

The combat was fun enough but ended up feeling quite samey after a while. I'd generally use the same handful of abilities and spells while ignoring the rest though maybe that would change in hard mode. The boss fights felt way too drawn out too but outside of a couple of fights that required you to play in a certain way I didn't have much trouble with any of them.

Easily the worst part of the game though was the padding. Shimmy through here, crawl through there, slowly traverse those monkey bars, do these little pointless mini puzzles, forced walking and jogging etc. The game could have easily been 10 hours shorter and I'd have enjoyed the game just as much if not more. The sidequest sections of the game dragged the story to a halt as well despite being enjoyable enough to complete. I thoroughly enjoyed the way they expanded the world and sections of the story but some of them were expanded way too much.

Overall it's beautiful, I've never liked the characters more and I'm excited to see where the story and gameplay goes from here. If you liked the original you'll probably like this too.
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Yea. 8 is fair. Love the graphics and voice acting, but the original is better in every other way unfortunately.


hdpcgamer said:
Uncharted 4 - 9/10

One of my favourite in the series.

Graphics and production values some of the best I've seen and still one of the best looking games out there on PC maxed out.

ND in their prime :)
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I would give this a 7 at best. Good graphics and sound. But the gameplay is on rails repetitive rubbish. Bored me to hell.
 
TNA said:
Yea. 8 is fair. Love the graphics and voice acting, but the original is better in every other way unfortunately.




I would give this a 7 at best. Good graphics and sound. But the gameplay is on rails repetitive rubbish. Bored me to hell.
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The complete opposite with me mate - had me engaged from start to finish.

The way you felt with this game is how I felt playing the 3rd game so I entered the 4th game with slightly low expectations.
 
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Aegis said:
Dead Space (2023) - 7/10

Hmm... some mixed feelings about this one as I'm a *huge* fan of the originals. This would've been an '8' but the PC port is (still) quite shonky and doesn't ever feel 'smooth' while you're playing it. EA/Motive seem to have abandoned the game too as there's been no patches for months now.

I'd say if you've never played the original and want to check out Dead Space then the remake is definitely the best way to experience the game given the stunning visuals and refined gameplay - be warned that playing with an mouse and keyboard is effectively easy mode as the game has been designed around using a controller.

FPS for me (3060 Ti @ 1440p) were all over the place sometimes in the 40's, sometimes in the 80's although mostly around 60. Almost every time you start moving the framerate will drop though as the game is constantly loading in assets.

Performance aside, the things I didn't like were mostly changes to the story so if you've never played DS these likely won't bother you (BIG spoilers below - you've been warned!):

I get they wanted Nicole to have a more prominent role in the story than just being a damsel to be rescued but it makes no sense to me that she'd be assigned to the Ishimura given her opposition to Unitology - why would the captain (a devout Unitologist) have her onboard when she's actively working to undermine the church? There were many ways Nicole could have played a greater part in the story but this was by far the laziest and dumbest the devs could have chosen.

They made Isaac a complete a-hole by retconning the last conversation he and Nicole had and having him (unfairly) blame her for the deaths of both of his parents - I get that he was distraught but Isaac's always been written as a decent, caring guy and seeing him acting like a complete ass was painful to watch for a long-time fan of the series. Writers: you don't always have to justify and explain everything - particularly if it's detrimental to your story/characters.

So they made Isaac older (why?) and made him look like Gunner Wright, the voice actor - fine? I guess? But Isaac Clarke is a character - like Leon Kennedy or Lara Croft - he's not Gunner Wright any more than Elias Toufexis is Adam Jensen in Deus Ex. I'm glad Gunner got to appear in 'his' game but he was already synonymous with the series through his voice work so it feels unecessary. Also they featured an older version of Nicole supposedly based on the voice actress' likeness and as much as I dislike the divisiveness, I have to agree - why did they make her so... haggard? Tanya Clarke (even in her 50's) is adorable!

Oh, and one last 'old man yells at cloud' - if you're going to make substantial changes to the likenesses and characters of Isaac and Nicole including aging them up and retconning their history - why not make them married? They're in their 40's-50's right? Seems the devs wanted to make a bunch of superficial changes to better shape what they thought Dead Space should be in 2023 without actually doing the work to make the characters and story better.
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I played the original and loved it and remember it performing smoothly with no hiccups in frame rate so it's a shame to see this remake stuttering which I am very prone to.

I have the same GPU as you and was wondering could the stuttering be due to a CPU bottleneck? What's you CPU?
 
Final Fantasy VII Remake - Intermission - 7/10

A fun little side story that was ultimately pretty pointless in terms of the main plot. As with the main game Yuffie was very likeable and fun to play as while the sidekick felt very generic JRPG protagonisty and the fact you couldn't fully control him was disappointing. Probably would have been an 8/10 had the final section not dropped the ball. What in the edgy weeaboo **** were those two?! I genuinely hope we never see them again but my hopes aren't particularly high on that one.

Difficulty was much steeper than the majority of the main game, probably died just as much in the 4 hours here as I did in the 30 in the main game. The final 2 bosses and the fight in between were very rough and I only just managed to beat them by keeping my distance and filling my ATB bar carefully in order to heal or revive my partner.

Looking forward to Rebirth now and may even pick up a PS5 to experience it on release.
 
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