Recent reviews by Dragnulls

RimWorld - Ideology DLC; must-have for story building, but ultimately non-crucial. For newcomers, DLCs that should be prioritized would ideally be: Biotech > Ideology > Royalty > Anomaly, based on personal opinion. I don't even own Anomaly, but you aren't missing out on much if you don't, just install SCP Containment related mods on the workshop, you'll pretty much get the same experience. Biotech is both notably more important and a de-facto essential requirement to own, it adds mechanics that are inherently tied to a colonial management simulator rather than feeling like optional additions. Royalty is a nice to have and gives more incentive to focus on geopolitics, along with tying into Ideology in certain aspects for game modding, but doesn't meaningfully flesh out aspects of the game with unique mechanics that are meaningful if you wanted dynamic geopolitics like fluid base development and AI interactions with the player and other AI factions, etc.

If you love the story building aspect of RimWorld, then you'll find this to be just as necessary as Biotech is for fulfilling gameplay. Also, this DLC can make niche, extremely difficult challenges easier. But, it also inverses as well, because it can notably increase the amount of tediousness you can potentially encounter that can feel redundant and a slog to both progression and your patience. That's partially due to the base vanilla implementation of the gameplay mechanics, but also due to the nature of the DLC itself. It does leave the implementation of this left to be desired, primarily because the ideologies don't add enough difference to gameplay and can feel redundant. However, fear not, modding is here to save the day, community mods for this are what truly shine and where a lot of the value comes from. While its a bit disappointing, as the base implementation should be able to stand on its own merit and should feel less like you're paying for the mechanic and more of you're paying for a thoughtful addition to the game, for me at least, and many others, this is unfortunately the reality.

While this is also true for Biotech as well, I would rather play with it on than off despite its faults, I don't feel much incentive to play the base vanilla implementation of this, which is a stark contrast. Really couldn't care about Loyalty being on or off, primarily wanted it to maximize compatibility with potential game modding and to an extent Ideology which is were its primary value comes due to the lack of expansion for geopolitical interaction. Either way, I clearly desire more fleshed out political aspects of RimWorld, which Ideology effectively addresses for me, so It'd be hard for me to say I can't recommend it as I couldn't imagine not playing with it, but you should be well aware of the faults and also the fact selling this for 20$ is an up-charge for its base implementation, I would recommend waiting for the DLC to go on-sale but would still recommend.

I primarily bought this because it adds children as a gameplay mechanic, which gives me another source of slave labor for my colonies. The additional technological mechanic additions and gene editing are nice too for mid to late game progression as well. Although I would recommend adding mods to flesh it out a bit more, as while I understand the nature of this is primarily geared towards mid and late game progression, how little it effects early game is a bit disappointing as there are still a modest void this DLC fails to potentially fill in for mid-early to early-mid game that community modders have decently expanded upon.

Nvidia's 4D chess move, make a tech demo designed to flex rather than actually be optimized for a beloved game that preforms badly on both RTX & RX cards. Why hasn't this either been delisted or remastered, and why is still being updated?

Seriously, the RX 7900 XT has RT performance comparable to the RTX 3090, it preforms good enough from personal experience, yet this is a outlier, as performance wise this is like last generation console. Not too enjoyable as an experience, combined with the other issues this still has, this is digital e-waste and shouldn't be bothered with.

After having played a good chunk of this game, I can say that it was pretty nice experience. Graphics looked good and the story was relatively fine. Although, you need some chonky hardware to play this game, which leads me to my next point.

Despite this, my biggest criticism of this game would be how undoubtedly pay-to-win it is, you're telling me I have to spend upwards of more than a dozen thousand dollars on HEDT workstation-grade level hardware like AMD threadripper/Intel xeon chips with over the top dual gpu setups and liquid nitrogen cooling to even have a chance to get on the leaderboard? That is outrageous and approaching mobile gacha game levels of P2W, hardly any skill involved and mostly just how much money can you throw into your character. Most people aren't the sons of a Saudi oil prince surprisingly, so kiss any chance you want at reaching the top ranks goodbye. Even with my hardware I spent over 3K USD total on, I do not come close to getting on the leaderboard, which doesn't even scratch the surface of potential score for my in-game character that can be gained without resorting to unfair strategies that involve what I mentioned previously.

Overall, while I enjoyed the experience personally, and I got decently far enough with what I have for a good experience, which is why I rate this positively, I cannot recommend for those who value proper game balancing and monetary agnostic mechanics that prioritize skill over paying to boost your stats.

This game has come a long way since its release, having owned it for most of its development cycle and being one of the first games i purchased on steam sometime back in mid 2015, the games development from then to now has effectively stood the test of time. Weirdly enough, its one of the rare few games on steam that feel like they should be priced quite frankly decently higher than their sale price, if there was a way to donate an additional 15 bucks or even higher which is what feels like this should be priced at to support the development, I would do it. Either way, you get the point, its good and should never be forgotten.

BeamNG is well optimized for a resource-intensive simulation game. While things like physic calculations are single threaded in nature, the game still makes effective utilization of multicore and multithreaded performance. When I turn off multithreading, it results in a significant decrease in performance of upwards to 50%, which is noted because this is usually the opposite case for a lot of games I own, primarily benefiting from higher singlethreaded IPC execution count and sustained singlecore clock speed rather than multithreaded and sometimes multicore parallel processing power. Although, that's mostly noticeable when I spawn a lot of traffic cars. Still nice to see a simulation game that effectively stresses my CPU. Just seeing all cores being utilized on task manager when I play brings me joy because I paid for the whole CPU, I want to use the whole CPU dammit. I would recommend getting an AMD Threadripper Pro for ideal performance to experience the distilled BeamNG Drive experience. Also, this game doubles as an amazing benchmark tool as well, fun to mess around with for this.

Which speaking of, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D handles this game like a champ, and if you're fine with forsaking responsiveness for how much cars you can spawn (which isn't recommended for what is about to come up next), then current flagship consumer-grade hardware can do a lot more stuff. Like for example, spawning 32 cars of traffic with the FPS capped at 60 on high settings w/o reflections (which effectively saturates all my CPU's threads, if you had a better GPU like an RTX 4090 then you'd probably be able to do this on ultra settings reliably until your cpu is the sole & primary bottleneck) on a large but clustered map like westcoast for example, is just immersive and makes BeamNG significantly more fun to play for me at least. Especially with a large car pool size with modded vehicles. With all that said, if I haven't made it clear enough, you need good hardware to get the full experience of BeamNG as I'm describing unfortunately, although mid-tier hardware can it decently well, just don't be expecting to do anything I just mentioned which is probably what you wanted to imagine playing BeamNG. If your hardware is capable, you will enjoy the experience it can potentially provide.

And, if BeamNG drive wasn't realistic enough, if you spawn enough traffic cars, the AI gets into frequent crashes and traffic jams without the need to intervene. Which is just how people drive were I live anyways. So, its an additional layer of realism that even if not intentional, and likely just the game being stretched in-terms of path finding & ai logic being tried to the games performance, at least unintentionally makes the game even more realistic than it already was in a humorous way.

Finally, BeamMP. Which is an entirely different experience, however requires you have top-tier hardware and copious amounts of ram, as BeamNG drive can consume decently more ram than it usually does when i play singleplayer. Which for me is fine, as BeamNG for me usually does so around 4GBs-8GBs (which is usually 16GB-20GB total system ram), you will definitely need atleast 32GBs to play BeamMP. Also, on top of the ridiculously over the top hardware requirement that needs to be checked if you want to play, combined with the issues outside of that particularly desync, it can be rather disappointing and not as fun as it sounds to be able to play BeamMP, even if you do meet this hardware requirement for good performance. ♥♥♥♥ was coded by apes with type writers, so lower your expectations fairly and maybe you can have a good time.

With all considered, the experience is mostly good. But if you cared about multiplayer, than it really on exists on-paper. Outside of that, tons of long-term replayability and continual support by the development team, BeamNG Drive is a worth while investment if you are into open-world simulation games.

When the world needed this Polish guy the most... He returned.

And oh boy, did he came back. Age of Civilization 2 was a game I greatly enjoyed, having over 500 hours in and bought since 2019. Despite how simple it was, it was very much fun. Modding gave it a significantly longer lifespan for playtime, but unfortunately you can only play bloody europe 2 for so long before you get bored, so for the past couple of years I've been itching for Age of History 3, as there was so much that could've been improved that it would take a long time to list. And now the day I longed for is here, my impression of it now is; it's notably more improved in a lot of aspects that were lacking from its predecessor that even modding didn't fill the void in. Its still relatively easy to learn, but the mechanics have been greatly expanded upon.

Despite this praise, the game is rough around the edges and needs to be further improved before I can truly recommend, which only time will tell whether or not this holds up. As of right now, buy at your own risk, as the potential for this is significant. But due to the rough edges, despite the improved upon mechanics and overall expanded additional ones, it just doesn't hit as well as one would think for someone who invested hundreds of hours into the previous game with the additional features added which should've given it a modestly better lifespan for potential replayability.

Overall, its improved from its predecessor gameplay wise, but its missed the mark on were it should've hit and needs time for the potential it has to fully shine. Buy with caution, and hope this guy actually sticks to a long-term development plan.

Got this for free with my micro center bundle purchase of my RX 7900 XT and Ryzen 7 7800X3D from AMD. Game runs flawlessly on ultra settings on 1440p & 4K with FSR quality.

While I myself am mostly uninterested in the Warhammer series, I did play the original game to this sequel back in 2014. While the first game didn't get enough recognition for time, this one does a more favorable service to its predecessor.

The gameplay from the original as from my memory has been considerably revamped, largely an improvement from the original. Although, the publisher of this title suffers from the same disease that tends to infect triple-a gaming titles, being consumeristic DLC policy I don't like. Outside of that, its relatively fine and serves as a good introduction for me into modern triple-a gaming as I've been stuck in mid-tier several year old hardware that has kept me to indie titles and older triple-a titles I grew up with as a kid.

Quite frankly essential and extends usefulness outside of gaming, would highly recommend for multi-monitor setups.

Although, there is a free version on github which I was primarily using for a few years to connect an old 1080p60hz display to my current setup, but replacing that with a 1440p165hz display and my old 1080p144hz monitor taking that place of my old secondary monitor feels far better, so out of gratitude I bought this to support the developer. Cheers! :D

I remember buying this game after watching early access YouTube videos back in 2017. Despite having several bugs (unironically, no pun intended, some of them were really annoying and even game-breaking) and going through a period of abandonment, the game is in a better state now. That said, the developer has made it clear that development is permanently done, which is unfortunate because it leaves the game feeling like wasted potential. Sure, you could say all that’s needed is to refine the mechanics and fix the lingering bugs, but even then, it wouldn't live up to the expectations the community once had for it. The current state honestly feels like the bare minimum to justify calling it out of beta.

The game itself? To be honest, it's 'meh.' Cool in concept, but not the best execution. It’s tough for me to say I dislike it, though, since I’ve beaten it on all difficulty levels and maps, so I clearly got my money’s worth. But if I’d known ahead of time that the hiatus was essentially permanent as a solution, it would’ve been harder to have the motivation I once had to play. I totally get why people say it’s wasted potential, and I think they’re valid in feeling that way.

So overall, just be aware of the game’s development history and where it stands now when you’re deciding whether or not it’s worth picking up. My recommendation is more based on the personal experience I had growing up with it rather than the game’s current state or the expectations the community once had. With everything considered, it’s not an easy yes or no, it’s more of a "meh" to be frank. You’ll have to see for yourself if the flaws are something you can cope with.

I don't turn this game on to play, it turns us on to play ;)