The last game you completed, and rating.

Baldur's Gate 3

Act 1: 9.5/10 (stunning, engrossing, worth the purchase price alone)
Act 2 9/10 (keeps the high standard going)
Act 3: 8/10 (mostly good, but a bit incoherent and unfinished in parts)
The Ending: 2/10 (oh dear, best I can say about this without spoilers is "well, I guess it's an ending ... of sorts").

Overall: 7.5/10 (a great game, but the ending REALLY lets the whole experience down. Hopefully they'll fix this with future patches like the say they intend to.)
 
Elden Ring. I put off playing it as I hadn’t liked some of the previous FromSoftware games, but I thought it was excellent and I’ve jumped straight into a NG+.

Scoring it 9/10 as I enjoyed it all, it didn’t ever feel like you had to grind levels and the fights were challenging but achievable. It looks good, plays smoothly and all in all was a lot of fun.

Only negative for me is how much of the game you can miss if you don’t do very specific random things and how many times you need to rest/revisit characters to progress their story. It made it so I felt like I had to use a guide of some sort to know what to do and the only guide gave too much information so it kind of spoilt some bits. I know it’s part of the game and that’s how it’s meant to be played, but it doesn’t add anything to be so convoluted. Plus there are still some bug; I had to give up on one storyline entirely
 
What Remains of Edith Finch
9/10 a great overall experience. It's definitely short and sweet, but fans of this sort of experience (looking at you firewatch) will almost certainly enjoy this. Played it on a flight on a steam deck and it was the perfect length. Really draws you in
 
Sniper Elite V2 Remastered - 7/10

Interesting to go back in time and see a previous entry - you can see how some things improved since then. It was a bit tough though with only having the checkpoint system and no manual saves. Aaagh. And the game really was just nasty at times, you think you'd cleared the level and then leg it towards the next marker but oh no, out of nowhere more baddies appear and kill you, so back to the last checkpoint again.
 
Baldur's Gate 3

Act 1: 9.5/10 (stunning, engrossing, worth the purchase price alone)
Act 2 9/10 (keeps the high standard going)
Act 3: 8/10 (mostly good, but a bit incoherent and unfinished in parts)
The Ending: 2/10 (oh dear, best I can say about this without spoilers is "well, I guess it's an ending ... of sorts").

Overall: 7.5/10 (a great game, but the ending REALLY lets the whole experience down. Hopefully they'll fix this with future patches like the say they intend to.)

Was thinking of picking this up in a few months, but going to wait for the half price sale in about a year. Should be fixed by then hopefully :)
 
Starfield 3/10

Oh my word, what a steaming pile of horse manure Bethesda. WTF.

I started hating the game after about 20 hours once I realised it was a failure. Once I actually finished it I just sat there and shook my head in disgust and disbelief at how bad it turned out to be.

I paid for early access too. Absolutely gutted about that.
 
Left Behind (Last of us expansion) 9/10 - really enjoyed it, story was good, Ellie is a wonderful character, 3 hours is just the right length. More story than zombie killing and I preferred it to the main game
 
Starfield 3/10

Oh my word, what a steaming pile of horse manure Bethesda. WTF.
Fascinating how polarizing this game has been.

I rate Starfield an 8.5/10 - not my favourite Bethesda game (that's New Vegas - Obsidian's game really) - but I rate it at least as high as Fallout 3 and (for me) Starfield is a better overall game than Skyrim.

Things I loved:

Huge amount of scripted quests - at least as much as Skyrim, probably more - the quality varies and (as seems the norm) the side-quests are better written than the main story *but* the main story's still more engaging than either Fallout 3 or Skyrim and has a much better payoff IMO.

Ship building is enormously fun and I've sunk countless hours into the game just tinkering. Whilst the actual space mechanics are pretty basic, the changes you make to your ship are significant and if you want to make a lumbering hauler or a nimble fighter (or anything in-between) you can. The UI is initially quite opaque but once you get into it, it's pretty easy to grasp.

Companions - Starfield has a bunch of them and besides certain missions, you're not stuck with any of them. Each named companion has a backstory that will reveal itself the more time you spend with them (admittedly, some are pretty slight). You also pick up new companions in the most unexpected of places. Yes, some of them can be a bit moralising, but if that bothers you there's always Vasco, the robot (who doesn't give a ****).

Speaking of morals, Starfield excels when it comes to presenting the player with moral choices both large and small. The easy option is frequently violence and intimidation but it's seldom the *only* option - for me, Starfield is the closest Bethesda has come to capturing the sheer range of possibilities that New Vegas had - it's not as good as NV but it does this better than their previous efforts.

Gun combat - it's simple but it's fun. The range of weapons is impressive, as is the modifications you can make to them. Also there's skills that allow you use your boost pack strategically in combat that just makes encounters hugely fun. The AI *is* kinda weird - vacillating between being as dumb as a box of rocks and then pinning you down and lobbing a ton of grenades at you. Companions are likewise a bit random in combat - they *can* be quite effective if you give them a decent weapon/some armour - they can also get stuck on the scenery quite a bit :D if the jank bothers you, you'll hate it. If (like me) it doesn't, then you might find it as amusing as I did.

Things I didn't love:

The loading - it's intrusive. Not so much that I couldn't enjoy the game, but enough that you can clearly see the game would have been better had it not been there.

Inventory and storage in general - this is incredibly miserly. Only one location in the game has infinite storage and you can only access that storage in that location. I spent a lot of time managing my inventory and hauling stuff around - looking back, I didn't mind it (there was always a goal in mind for what I was doing) but if stuff like that bothers you you'll *hate* Starfield.

Loot - the loot tables are just *bad*. This is somewhat offset by the fact that you can mod stuff yourself using crafting tables but there's some really useful buffs that are only available as loot drops and as a result I spent at least half of the game wearing the same space suit (eww..) and a good third of it using the same weapons.

Outposts - there's a whole bunch of content (crafting, skills, gameplay mechanics) dedicated to outposts and actually *building* outposts is quite fun - but they serve no practical purpose in the game other than as an end-game 'I'm going to tinker with this because I've done everything else'. It's amazing to me that they had a system from Fallout 4 that seemed tailor-made for Starfield and yet somehow they completely failed to make it work. Such a wasted opportunity.

The skill tree - Starfield has 82 separate skills each with 4 tiers - you get one skill point with every level you gain. I stopped playing after nearly 300 hours at level 79 - so yeah - a lot of stuff still to unlock. Having additional things to do in a game isn't bad but the problem with Starfield's skill tree is that a lot of useful and fun skills are locked behind a bunch of fairly useless ones. The skill tree didn't prevent me from having fun with this game (and I never felt the need to grind XP) but it did unnecessarily gate-keep some of that fun.

TL;DR? It's a Bethesda game - for me, one of their better ones, but YMMV.
 
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Fascinating how polarizing this game has been.

I rate Starfield an 8.5/10 - not my favourite Bethesda game (that's New Vegas - Obsidian's game really) - but I rate it at least as high as Fallout 3 and (for me) Starfield is a better overall game than Skyrim.

...

TL;DR? It's a Bethesda game - for me, one of their better ones, but YMMV.

I'm just wrapping up. I have oscillated between outright disliking the game, being frustrated and a little bit bored by it, and really loving it and being totally engrossed.

It has so many Bethesda hallmarks, good and bad, as you say.

Things I have loved:
The starship building - it took me a while to get into it, but one I started tricking out my ships with custom parts I found it a great addition to the game and I can see how people get lost in it for so long. I ended up with a Narwhal that now only has one original hab and the original reactor and grav drive. It has over 1400 shields, 2000 hull, 140 speed, 100 maneuverability and enough fuel to hop from one end of the galaxy to the other. It has six Vanguard Obliterators and three Alpha Beams. It disintergrates other ships as soon as it aims in their general direction. And it has a kind of "black with gold trim deadly flying space brick" aesthetic. I am going to miss it in NG+

The companions - well, the quests. Some of the companion quests are acutally really good and well worth doing.

The questlines - well, the faction ones, mainly. Some of them, anyway. I was almost a space pirate! :)


Things I have disliked:
The starship building - the interface is just awful. So clunky, and if it hadn't been for some helpful pointers from fellow posters here I wouldn't have got anywhere with it. And I still can't line up doors and ladders very well. It's annoying having no way to see your intertior from the build screen.

And the mechanic limiting parts to different shipyards can get in the bin. Yeah, ok, I get it - there're different manufacturers with different specialisms, but come on, parts are already level-gated and gated behind the ship design skill. Can't we have some way to access all the parts so we don't have to make dummy parts to fly our ships from one yard to the next.

The companions - they range from lawful stupid to "champion of truth and justice but grumpy about it" to "champion of truth and justice but also sarcastic" and "champion of truth and justice who's also kind-of-but-not-really a melancholic space cowboy from the melancholic truth-and-justic space cowboy planet." Oh, and a robot, who apparently doesn't care less about anything. I was almost a space pirate, dammit! These sacharine blandies just won't cut it for that lifestyle!

Actually, I would have been a space pirate if it hadn't been for me knowing how preachy and annoying my crew would have been about it! Maybe I am being harsh, but they are all so sickeningly earnest and cloyingly worthy. And I'm generally a goody two-shoes in RPGs myself.

And Vasco randomly flings NPCs across the map, apparently, so he's a bit annoying just for that.

The questlines - well, the main one specifically. Some really dragged-out quests in this one (ahem, Entangled...), and two antagonists who just felt very flat and one-dimensional in terms of character.
And it felt very wrong that my character with no points in social bascially by happenstance talked them into giving up the mission they'd apparently spent lifetimes across multiple universes pursuing. Okay then. All good, I guess. As you were...

Buy hey, 80+ hours and I'm still going to give NG+ a whirl so on balance it's doing something right for me...
 
I'm just wrapping up. I have oscillated between outright disliking the game, being frustrated and a little bit bored by it, and really loving it and being totally engrossed.

It has so many Bethesda hallmarks, good and bad, as you say.

...

Buy hey, 80+ hours and I'm still going to give NG+ a whirl so on balance it's doing something right for me...
Can't disagree with any of that - the game has an enormous amount of 'stuff' and all of it is a bit half-baked or rough-around-the-edges. If you find the setting and the stories compelling, you're going to have a frustrating but ultimately worthwhile time with Starfield - if not, then I imagine it's going to be really hard to overlook its myriad flaws.

Some interesting stats from Steam:

Out of 103,800 total reviews, Starfield currently sits at a 70% overall.

Limiting that to those that have played it for over 1 hour (101,605 reviews) gives it a 71% rating.

Limiting it further to those that have played it for 10 hours or more (81,836) gives it 76% positive.

Lastly, limiting it to those that have played over 100 hours (8,911 reviews), Starfield sits at 74%.

I think that's pretty fair - personally I score it higher than that, but I wouldn't argue with someone calling it a 7.5 game.
 
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Sniper Elite 3 - 8/10

Quite a bit better than V2. So maybe V2 should be reduced a point to 6/10. Might skip Sniper Elite 4 now as it's only been a year or two since I played it and play 5 instead.
 
Fascinating how polarizing this game has been.

These are the things that killed it for me:

  • The amount of loading screens and fast travel. I typically never fast travel in open world games as it ruins my sense of immersion, however, in this game it's basically mandatory. On top of that the loading screens are really, REALLY excessive and again, constantly pulled me out of the experience.
  • The complete lack of genuine exploration. I have always loved BGS games for the sense of exploration and wonder just slowly walking around their immersive environments and soaking it all in. There is none of that here. Walking around barren planets is mind numbingly boring and I am shocked out how little actually surprised me or gave me any sense of actual discovery.
  • The boring and weird NPC conversations. After playing games like BG3 and TW3 I just can't take BGS NPC dialogue and conversations seriously any more. The way they just stare at you like soulless robots looking like brothers and sisters because they all have the same eyes, movements, and facial expressions. This is the first game to ever genuinely put me to sleep and more than once.

There are a ton of other things I could list which ruined the game for me but those 3 are the core reasons I hate it.

For the record, I have literally hundreds of hours in Skyrim and would be happy if that was the only game I could ever play for the rest of my life. Starfield doesn't even compare to it.
 
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These are the things that killed it for me:

There are a ton of other things I could list which ruined the game for me but those 3 are the core reasons I hate it.

For the record, I have literally hundreds of hours in Skyrim and would be happy if that was the only game I could ever play for the rest of my life. Starfield doesn't even compare to it.
Those are all absolutely valid complaints - as I mentioned above, I can definitely understand why some players are going to bounce hard off of Starfield.

I also played a *lot* of Skyrim (even made a few mods for it) but its fantasy setting never appealed to me as much as Fallout's post-apocalypse or Starfield's sci-fi setting which is why personally, it's the lesser game for me (I've never had the urge to play The Witcher games either but Cyberpunk is totally my jam).
 
Finished Terminator Resistance last night. Really enjoyed it as an older school gaming experience. Some of the story and voice lines where really wooden but the exploring and combat pretty fun. Really looking forward to Robocop now

8/10 for the non AAA price
 
Starfield - 6/10

Started out hating it, but it did get better as the game went on. In the end I just wanted to finish it. I didn't bother at all with the outpost stuff (Never enjoyed it in Fallout 4). The companions were pretty meh. Only one I really liked was Andreaj. Far too many bugs and too many boring/irritating quests (Especially the stealth ones). The whole 1000 planet thing was also a massive let down. I would have been happier with 50 planets and more actual cities. Every planet without a town/city just seemed to be a copy/paste of the last one with nothing to do. What is the point ? The AI was also infuriating most of the time. I had encounters with enemies who just literally stood there, and some NPC's who were frozen to the spot. In the end I was just glad to get it over with.
 
Lies of P
Just beat the last boss this afternoon. I can understand why this doesn't seem to click with some people, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it's my favourite of the Souls-like type of games not made by From Software or Team Ninja, and my GOTY for 2023 so far. Loved the dark atmosphere, the kind of gothic/steampunk mash-up setting. Some (but by no means all) of the bosses were really well-designed and fun to fight. I liked most of the levels too, and there were some nice nods to the From trademarked trolling of players here and there that made me smile even as I died to it. I've learned more than I knew before about how much darker the original Pinocchio story was than the Disney version I knew, and some of the ways they've adapted the characters to fit the game's narrative were really well done.

For me it's an 8.5-9/10 game. Some flaws and some overtuned enemies, but I haven't had the sense of satisfaction after finishing a game since Elden Ring.
 
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