Recent reviews by Aeldari

Great fun, easy to play and hard to master as they say.

I might be a bit biased as a Granblue Fantasy mobile player but I think the game captures the essence of GBF very well and plays smoothly as a passable fighting game. Not as fast paced as BlazBlue or Guilty Gear, not quite as technical and 'anal' as Street Fighter, I have to admit there's absolutely no balance regarding the moveset of the characters but the game hits the sweet spot overall as a 2.5D fighting game.

There's the classic arcade and versus modes, an RPG mode where you get to play it like a beat em up kind of game and collect stuff for your "weapon grid", an online mode that I haven't touched, plenty of decent tutorials and 'missions' you can go through. The concept art is straight from the GBF mobile game and it's as gorgeous as it was over there, music is beautiful and I believe most of it is from the mobile game as well, UI is sleek and responsive, plenty of PC options unlike most console ports. Everything feels high quality.

As for the downsides, I don't have a lot of bad things to say about the game, as far as fighting games go I love asymmetrical game design and fluid easy-to-perform combos. If I had to complain about one thing it'd be how long it takes to start up the game with the "Connecting to Server" pop up just staying there for a while, but that's a nitpick.


To conclude, the game is pretty damn expensive, even moreso with the added DLCs and character packs. Honestly I don't know if it's worth the full price, but definitely worth a buy with a bit of discount (%30~%50), especially the character packs. Beautiful game, interesting characters, good quality production.

A great beat 'em up game that's got the good old retro spirit but with more modernised visuals and combos. Great music, lovely characters, fun coop and somewhat lengthy story mode with a good variety of enemies that keep it fresh. Each SoR 4 character have their own unique quirks and combos as well as weaknesses, it's a lot of fun playing through the entire game several times over trying different styles.

If I had to complain about anything, it'd be the older SoR characters feeling a bit too authentic in the sense that they turn the game into a single attack button masher. There's also quite a bit of input lag in coop mode but it doesn't make the game unplayable, not the best netcode but not the worst either. And lastly shield enemies are a bit of a drag, they kill the whole pacing of every battle as you have to approach them differently and with quite a bit of time and effort wasted with your whole focus shifted on them, they just deal way too much damage to ignore.

I have enjoyed and played through the whole thing at my own pace and never felt rushed but I have to admit, every single boss fight except Ethel perhaps felt extremely unfair and made to frustrate you and eat your "tokens" as much as possible, faithful to the arcades maybe, it was almost a deal breaker for me.

Still looking forward to play more of this when the upcoming Ethel DLC drops, so I can ditch the half arsed SoR2 Axel Ethel mod for good. Would recommend this to anyone with a penchant for retro arcade games.

I've got nothing positive to say about this game other than that it meets the bare minimum adequacy of basic controls and tolerable visuals to pass as a game, aside from that I enjoyed sailing for the brief amount of time I spent with the game. This was my experience with the game:

I spent near an hour and a half on getting a half decent looking character, there's no way of changing the way you look other than hair and clothes, it's all about shuffling the initial character "creation" till you get lucky with a character that doesn't look straight out of a Ren&Stimpy cartoon or a vietnam vet with mushed-in face.

Tutorial seemed like it was building up for a treasure hunt or some great adventure with monsters and skeletons and whatnot, well that's not the case at all. I set sail after the terrible character creation and I'm told to go to some island and grab the treasure on a "maiden voyage" which is meant to be introductory I'm assuming. Barely 5 minutes in and I see a massive ship with 3 dudes on it docked near the island I'm supposed to go to, they immediately try to snipe me with rifles and cannons as I get closer to the island, then proceed to chase after me as if I have anything worth taking... I alt-F4 without giving them any satisfaction and start over with the stupid tutorial instead...

Second attempt, I get to a different island and grab the treasure without any interference, sail back to the outpost quickly only to see the next massive ship with a full crew waiting at the harbour, turning towards me and speeding up as I approach the island. I circle around the island and sell the loot ASAP and I get a message telling me my ship has been damaged. I return to the harbour to witness the "high level" dudes with cash shop skins derping around on my ship crashing it around while I'm turning in the loot that was worth 100 gold (pocket change).

I've played DayZ before, I've played GTA Online in public lobbies, played Black Desert Online with its open world PVP, got plenty of other PVP games in my library but hadn't expected anything on this scale, haven't seen anything this toxic in a long time, griefing new players right off the bat.

Can't recommend this cesspool of a game to anyone, complete waste of time in my experience until they add some sort of PVE servers.

It's like Kantai Collection, only better.

Jokes aside, this is an overly simplistic Unreal Engine 4 spinoff of the objectively awesome bullet-hell gacha game called Azur Lane where you get introduced to the world of "shipgirls" with a parallel universe World War 1/2 undertones and fight off an alien invasion of sorts along with internal struggle between the factions, while engaging in cute/ecchi anime antics on the side. It's also full of waifus, with very distinct visuals, personalities and tasteful art for the most part.

The game itself consists of very heavy Visual Novel style scenes with plenty of dialogue to read through, some very casual real-time arcade battles in between and some kind of a VS mode where you get to fight certain premade teams without engaging in campaign features or any kind of dialogue. You'll be spending most of your time with collecting points by either farming VS battles or playing through the story at your own pace, unlocking the shipgirls you like with these points and gearing them up with shop or research items respectively outside the VN side of the game.

The framerate seems to be locked at 60, haven't noticed any kind of performance issues, crashes or any kind of bugs personally. Music is great and catchy, everything is beautifully voice-acted in japanese. One major caveat I had with the technical side of the game is that you have to edit some text files to change your key mapping at the moment as the game doesn't give you the option and it's optimised for controllers, Keyboard+Mouse is manageable and quite playable but you can feel cramped at times when you have to activate a skill with Enter during combat or use J and ; to navigate in menus.

There's not a lot left to say about the game; it's small, it's sweet and it plays well. If you're expecting it to be on a Nier Automata or even Sword Art Online level of quality/depth however, you might be disappointed.


I should also note that this game was probably made for Azur Lane fans (much like the anime)[myanimelist.net], anyone outside that may feel lost or overwhelmed about the whole premise and characters, but that shouldn't hold you back from enjoying it as an arcade action/VN hybrid anime game on its own, it could be a pleasant introduction for the original gacha game[play.google.com] it's based on if nothing else, both are well worth a try.

An oldschool FPS game that shares the same gameplay mechanics and engine as Duke Nukem 3D. The controls are very responsive and well suited for combat, sound is mediocre at best and not as meaty as Shadow Warrior or Duke Nukem 3D, graphics are on par with the older games of the same engine; the biggest selling point of this game is the unnecessarily large open world-ish city like maps and the overall low scifi theme (meaning there's lots of ballistic weaponry rather than lasers and aliens), if you enjoy that and the game engine itself, then this is your game.

There's quite a bit of variety in weapons and it's not overly hard to find ammo as long as you alternate between weapons throughout the game rather than sticking with one or two all the time. In contrast to that, there's a painful lack to the enemy variety; you will see the same bunch of enemies from start to finish and their AI leaves much to desire, often instantly shooting you on sight without leaving you much of a chance to take cover or shoot them first no matter how fast you are. The difficulty of your choice only seems to affect the amount of enemies rather than the enemies being bullet-spongy or "harder" to fight against, although ammo is always scarce at higher difficulties which greatly subtracts from the fun you'll have when you're not scrounging and exploring every corner for a couple of bullets.

Boss fights were the one thing I hated about this game along with the occasional repetition of maze-like maps with random enemy placements all over the place with annoying drones and skull spiders as cherry on top. There's more often than not a single way of dealing with a boss, a very specific weakness and a convoluted way to go about it in order to beat them - given that you've been saving whatever precious ammo you had for it rather than having fun killing normal enemies with them. As for repetition, when you've played the first 15-20 minutes of this game, you've seen it all then, not much changes after that point in terms of story, gameplay or new mechanics.

I'd highly recommend the game only if you've ever played and enjoyed one of the following older games, otherwise I'd say give it a pass unless it's dirt cheap as it's not for everyone: Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Witchhaven. It's essentially nostalgia porn, does what it does the best and brings not much new to the table. It entertained me for a good 6 hours before it got stale and unbearable, as a big fan of the titles I mentioned above.



On a sidenote, the developers are incredibly self-conceited, disrespectful and evidently alt-right folk with a nasty backward sense of humour outside the game if you wish to not support them with that in mind. But personally I've seen none of that in the game and it didn't have much effect on me nor my review of the game.

A well done open-world TPS game that takes place in 70s post-vietnam war where you play as a big black angry dude that later gets involved with the local mafia - hence the title. It's pretty similar to Mafia 2 except for the fact that they've improved every single aspect of it and made the game much more forgiving, accessible, cinematic experience rather than a truly open-world GTA clone (which would've been fine in my book either way).

• Lovely graphics. Everything looks just right and realistic. The immersion is great, there's nothing silly or over the top in the game and it feels authentic.
  
• Soundtrack consists of the most popular 70s Rock and Pop songs, you never run out of good stuff to listen to as there's only 3 radio stations and always something good playing on at least one of them when you don't like one or two songs.
  
• Aside from the accuracy issue I mentioned down there, the combat is very satisfying. You can get seriously hurt with just a few bullets (although you can heal instantly with injections) and can get instant kills on headshots and well placed shots on the torso of the enemies. Very comfortable to shoot from and at moving vehicles, from covers, and on the move. Quite similar to GTA 5 in that sense minus the GTA bullet sponginess. Stealth and melee also works brilliantly, you can choose to sneak in and kill everyone with your bare hands if you wish to, the game doesn't force you into gun fights.
  
• A small but very well done arsenal of weapons, old vehicles and outfits to choose from. Personally I would've enjoyed more freedom and characters to create or choose from but I've enjoyed playing Lincoln the Big Black Dude and murdering people with my mitts of doom. To put it bluntly: Very limited customisation but done just right.

• Driving is the worst part of this game, while much better than Mafia 2, still manages to be infuriating with all the bugs, suicidal pedestrians that throw themselves under you, unresponsiveness or oversteering when it's not supposed to. Driving ruined about %50 of the game for me and believe me this game is full of it, you need to drive everywhere.
  
  You drive to a point to get a mission, you drive to the objective to start the mission, very often you drive during the mission, and then most of the time you drive to end the mission. You will be circling the map for about 2-3k miles back and forth doing missions and it will feel god awful until you progress in story and unlock better stuff much much later in the game. The game literally rewards you with better steering and better speed for enduring so long with awful game mechanics.
  
  
• Monotonous side-missions. I've come to the conclusion that the side-missions are solely there to provide a way of making money through grinding as it never changes; in one mission you're asked to steal a truck repeatedly and you get paid for each, another mission will ask you to keep killing some assassination targets over and over. I didn't grind so I'm not sure if it's endless but it was dull enough to test my patience.
  
• Camera angles in combat. You will often find yourself missing close-mid range targets with auto rifles and SMGs even when you should've hit them, spraying bullets all around them rather than where you're aiming at. I believe this was an old Unreal Engine bug, not sure if it's the same case here in Mafia 3.
  
• Not a serious one but the credits sequence lasts for 15 minutes!!! If you wanted to reload your checkpoint quick and see all the different endings, well tough luck!

It's a great game with short but great DLCs, most of the old bugs are fixed right now and remaining ones aren't as game breaking. I still can't recommend paying full price but definitely worth a try with a %40 discount or more. The reasoning behind that is because the game is far too cinematic, it's like watching a good movie and the world feels rather empty if you want to do stuff on your own like you would in GTA or a Saints Row game. While being narrative-focused isn't a bad thing, it is incredibly restrictive. Don't buy this game thinking it's a GTA clone, but expect it to play as "comfortably" like one (minus the annoying driving issues).

Agents of Mayhem is basically a hero shooter game with a singleplayer campaign in a parallel Saints Row universe.

You pick a party of 3 heroes out of 12 characters (+2 DLC), switch between them at will, do missions, raids, open world activities and of course "dailies". Not much else to say about the game, there's no real defining features or anything new in comparison to the latest Saints Row games, nevertheless fun enough of a game and definitely worth a look when it's at least %75 off, otherwise I can't recommend it at all as the game becomes stale and repetitive pretty fast, and it's ultimately a single playthrough experience. You can of course continue playing after finishing the final mission and keep playing but not a lot to do at it's current state once you're through with the campaign. It took me about 20 hours to finish the game and I wasn't in a hurry.

• A colourful wide array of playable characters including a couple old Saints Row characters. Each with their own dialogues, responses and special abilities. Each character has a certain trait where they can either damage shields or armour better than others, more powerful against bosses and similar such feats. While it makes the game feel fresh everytime you choose a different party, the gameplay mechanics are still the same and keeps it stale.
  
• Well done cel-shaded graphics. Not a fan of cel-shading normally but it suits the art style of this game, half comicy half GTA clone. It comes at the expense of gore of course, enemies simply either ragdoll or fade away.
  
• Driving is very solid and genuinely fun compared to older Saints Row games, the mechanics are really well done. But you rarely get to do anything with a vehicle other than to get to your destination and a couple silly car chase minigames with exceptionally awful AI that always catch up to you and blow up instantly at the slightest bump.
  
• Public contracts. This is a singleplayer game, but you can start a public contract yourself or join one in progress with other AoM players and work towards the same goal, earning money and resources.
  
• Cartoony cutscenes are as lovely as it is cheesy.

• There's some performance issues when driving around in the city, fps randomly drops and the game stutters almost to a full freeze at times. It rarely happens in combat but enough to be very annoying, not bad enough to get you killed anyhow. I've had this happen many times and I'm using a GTX1080 with an i5 cpu which is good enough for a lot of other more hardware-intensive games.
  
• Lack of customisation. You can unlock new skins for your characters and their weapons through a rigorous mundane grind, most of them will be a reskin of your default outfit/weapon with a different colour. You can also add certain perks to enhance your character's weapon and skill, even supplement it further with Legion Tech which you earn from certain missions; it does give you an edge in combat but it's really just some number crunching at the end, nothing major.
  
• Bulletspongy enemies. It's bad enough even for an arcade game, but this is on a Division level, perhaps more comparable to Shadow Warrior 2 in the sense of different characters being more effective against certain armour/shield types, to a point where you don't do any damage anymore with a hero that isn't suitable against one type of enemy, rendering the hero useless at the time and forcing you to switch to someone you don't necessarily like or want to use.
  
• Lack of Coop, it would've been perfect for this game.
  
• Lack of Replayability.
  
• The car radio isn't functional, there isn't any kind of music in the game other than the cutscenes.
  
• The enemy units are often unfairly powerful especially at harder difficulties, forcing you to use a very certain hero against them [again], difficulty itself is very artificial and it only adds more health and damage to the enemies while nerfing your heroes to death unless you resort to using special gadgets and abilities every single time you fight these special units that either buff, fly, become invulnerable or make other enemies invulnerable for a very long time. Combat becomes a colourful clusterfug of rainbows and lasers at higher difficulties as they keep calling reinforcements and you can't kill them off fast enough.

It's still a decent game despite all the weaknesses. Expect a watered down scifi Saints Row clone rather than a sequel. Don't pay more than £10 for the base game.

I've been looking forward to buying this game since the release, heard some great things about it, screenshots looked awesome, trailers were pretty good. Sadly the actual game had none of that... It's nothing but a brand at the end.

Here are some personal pros and cons from the short amount of time and experience I've had with the game before getting a refund:

• The atmosphere is great and probably the strongest point of the game, even more so if you're a fan of the franchise. Dark, moldy, metallic and bloody/toxic, the usual Warhammer feel.
  
  
• Music is pretty good and adds a lot to the atmosphere. Very warhammery in general.
  
  
• There's quite a bit of unlockables and customisation, not as many as I would've liked but a decent amount nonetheless. You can name your soldiers and heroes, pick their cosmetic armour style, hair colour, dye their clothes and such.
  
  
• Game lets you climb over walls and certain obstacles, very nice thought, saves a lot of time.
  
  
• Your units can get visually and permanently injured such as losing an arm, break a bone, have bad vision or get ill. It can be a bit annoying but a nice feature.

• The combat and gameplay mechanics are incredibly dull, shoddy and frustrating. You will often get stuck on environment in a game where you have free movement in a turn based setting that subtracts action points as you go.
  
  
• I'm not usually one for fancy graphics but this one seemed like a game from early 2000s at maxed out settings, the lack of anti-aliasing and the half arsed lighting/shadows are quite disturbing. That being said it's not god awful and somewhat tolerable. Not something I'd want to look at for over half an hour. The game was developed with the Unity engine and that just adds to my disappointment.
  
  
• Lack of variety. It didn't seem like there were a lot of heroes and units you could buy and use. I searched it online as well and ended up being disappointed. There's only 5 factions to choose from which have about 7 units each.
  
  
• Not a game for the impatient ones. While being dull on it's own, it also drags itself along; an average single match can last for over 40 minutes, around 20-25 if you know what you're doing apparently (which I don't). It's a game you'd need to invest lots of effort and time in, not because it's so full of things to do, but because it takes that long to even find each other on the map while painfully waiting for turns step by step. (And this is coming from an X-Com fan. "All work and no fun" would be how I'd describe this.)

I can't recommend this game to anyone as a turn-based tactical RPG, but maybe as a generic Warhammer title which Games Workshop seems to be giving out licences for like candy so generously. Though I'm sure hardcore fans could overlook how bad and boring the game is and enjoy the Warhammerness deep in there somewhere.

A tiny program that let's you capture certain monitor(s) or just crop an area you'd like and either take a screenshot or record video or audio. There seem to be more features to it that I haven't explored yet along with some extra tools but this alone made me love ShareX and that is why I'm recommending it. For recording games I'd still go with OBS or Shadowplay.

For example you could use this to record a live stream, a youtube video you're watching, some song you liked and can't find anywhere for downloading, possibly game recording, a certain part of a movie you want to share with someone or... you know... porn. Enough said. You can set the video format to avi, mp4 (x264-x265). xvid and even gif; audio to mp3, aac, vorbis. You can fiddle around with quality settings with ease - with the added popup tooltips that tell you which does what in layman terms. Let's you upload your screenshots or recordings to several popular hosting sites including imgur, gfycat, imageshack, tinypic, mediafire, dropbox, even twitter. You can also take a "scrolling screenshot", meaning you'd have a whole large page in one image without the need to scroll down and take multiple screenshots. Most common image formats are available such as JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF with customisable quality options.

Moreover, it's absolutely free, no trials, no premium upgrades that I know of, just a small download and you're set. Might be useful to add that the program doesn't make you seem "In-App" constantly on the steam status, you can launch it and let it run in the background while playing games and such without messing up steam overlay or in-game status.


PS: For those interested, just a tip to make things easier/faster. Go to Task Settings > Screen Recorder > Screen Recording Options. Install the "recorder devices" with the button there and let it set things up on it's own, then change the format and settings to your liking, set a hotkey and make sure it's green and not red - otherwise it means it's clashing with another hotkey in another program and won't work, and you're good to go. Can't emphasise how easy to use and simple it is, no need to be tech savvy for this.

A rather well done TPS / Car Combat game that's seemingly mostly aimed at its fanbase. Well worth the price tag if you're a fan, otherwise you might want to consider grabbing it at half price on certain online stores. Here's why:

I don't know what I was expecting from the game, loved the Mad Max 2 and Fury Road, but apparently there isn't all that much to do in post-apocalyptic Australia (much like the modern Australia lol). That being said it's still quite fun if you enjoy the genre and/or the franchise as it's very well done. As to what you can do in the game, from what I've seen/done so far: drive, help out people in the desert, conquer forts/camps, drive, help other forts/camps and upgrade them, collect cars and drive them as you like, customise your own car Magnum Opus extensively, raid convoys, scavenge, and drive some more. The whole game is car and melee centric, and even though you get a couple firearms - don't expect to use them a lot, bullets are a rarity.

Graphics are somewhat out-dated but decent, sounds could use some work but the dialogues are perfect and authentic, there's no music to be heard and it get's a bit dull at times because of it since most of the game involves you driving to places, combat mechanics are exactly the same as Batman and Assassin's Creed with more emphasis on traps, cheap gimmicks and dirty tricks. Driving felt a bit wonky for me, there's this half second delay when you turn left/right even when the game is running smoothly, not sure if that's supposed to make you play cautiously or just give a feeling of realism. Tutorial is god awful but you can figure out the whole game in an hour, or be stuck with the simplest thing forever, typical Warner Bros game in that aspect, huge popups and messages and overall dumbed down user experience is to be expected.

Despite everything, the game runs really well on PC and it might be comparable to GTA 5 in regards to performance, except the CPU tends to get a little hot during gameplay. I'd say it's a very well done port.

If you like driving muscle cars in the desert and running over australians, this game is perfect for you. Think of it like... "Shadow of Mordor with cars" if that helps.



*Edited as I've recently got to finish the game*



My final conclusion would be to suggest avoiding this game unless it's on +%75 sale or you got nothing better to do.

It's insanely repetitive, the whole experience is about enjoying the atmosphere and hunting for achievements to get better upgrades through painful chores like "kill 15 enemies with a finisher to gain a level", "ram 20 cars with your butt to gain another level", gather all those levels up to 10 and that might just get you an upgrade or two but then please farm 1500-2000 scraps to do that which you will only get about 15-20 from each vehicle you destroy and a veeery little more from bases and scavenging around. Grind, farm, grind, farm and then some more farm.

After all that is done, you get to enjoy the game for about 2 hours maybe before it's over. It's an incredibly short, painful, trivial adventure; Awfully linear, and vehicle controls make it all the more painful, this game can be but wasn't meant to be played on a PC. But that's just me being optimistic, I honestly believe it just works that way, you graze a little rock while going with a decent speed and you do a 180 degree spin instantly, a random car bumps into you and you're doing 360 ollies while crashing through rocks and wrecked cars which damage you even further. Don't even get me started on missions that require night time, you can't do anything about it but wait for hours in real time. Another thing I passionately hated was the minefields, you need to go to a base, grab a really weak dodgy buggy and let your dog guide you around to the general direction of the minefield and the mines on it, it adds absolutely nothing to the game.

At the end this was a game for Mad Max fans, gameplay and story isn't well thought out, all you have is the brand. If you enjoy the franchise immensely, you will probably love the game. Otherwise not worth more than $10.

Although maybe I should add that I'm a big fan and really enjoyed the game despite the god awful flaws, but I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone!