Recent reviews by Choc goblin

The base game of Dying Light had the potential to be just another generic open-world or zombie game, forgotten and lost to time. But it wasn't. What kept it fresh and interesting was (at least, as far as I'm concerned) the incredible movement tech of its parkour system, and fairly populated and detailed maps with dense verticality, perfectly utilising everything this feature had to offer.

In Dying Light: The Following however, it feels like they take any successes and lessons learned, and throw them out the window. Gone are the urban sprawls of the Harran's slums and old town. Instead, we get the vast expanse of its countryside... and all the wide-open emptiness it brings, offering little more than grass hills, dirt roads and wooden fences. It feels like it misses the point entirely of what made the original Dying Light so engaging in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Fairly early on in this campaign, they at least ease you into the exploration of this zone by introducing you to the buggy. This thing is incredibly hit-and-miss. What you start out with is a broken, run-down vehicle that's a chore to drive and a pain to keep up & running - thanks mainly to their insistence on porting the tiresome crafting and durability/repair system from melee weapons over to the buggy's mechanical parts, as well. Over time the vehicle becomes more reliable and enjoyable to cruise around with, as you accrue driver upgrades through a skill tree.

But it's such an arduous slog down the driver progression path, that you'll be LONG finished with all the content this expansion has to offer before you get anywhere near close to realising the vehicle's full potential. It also just doesn't patch up the gaping hole left behind from the base gameplay loop, where parkour traversal to each destination was actually part of the FUN. Scooting around a barren empty world in a rinky-dink vehicle isn't exactly original, or all that engaging... especially when the game keeps throwing the same two or three driving hazards at you ad-nauseam, seemingly to just get in your way.

As for the narrative, the main storyline starts out intriguing but unravels into convolution as it gears up for the finale, where it presents two ending choices - neither of which feel like they stick the landing. Whilst I think I followed it with more interest than the base game campaign, It really didn't feel like there was a proper build-up and pay-off with its conclusion. At least as with the base game, I again found the background characters and side stories to be somewhat more interesting, and rewarding some of the exploration that lent purpose to trudging through this desolate countryside.

When the game fails to utilise what it is exactly that made it unique in the first place, what we're left with is something that feels more generic than it should. If you've played a Far Cry in the last 10-15 years, you've basically experienced what this is already. The fact that the desirable base game mechanics are still given some opportunities to shine here is somewhat of a saving grace, but eventually I was just finding this DLC tiresome to complete compared to the base game - which is especially damning given it's only about a quarter of its length.

★★★✰✰

To me personally, one of the most unlikely and confusing mysteries in the entire gaming industry has always been the longevity of Dying Light. I'm not saying it's a bad game - in fact it IS actually a decent game, scratching an itch somewhere inbetween your Dead Island's and your Far Cry's. But while my interest in checking it out was pretty mild back at release, the sustained relevance it proceeded to enjoy over the coming years continued to pique my interest more.

I finally checked it out nearly 10 years after release... and after finishing most of the content in the game? Honestly, I'm still confused as ever.

Despite being a first-person game with some guns, Dying Light doesn't really feel like an FPS. Many of them aren't particularly fun to use. Rather, I'd even go as far as to say the opposite. Which is fine... the game rarely ever FORCES you to actually use them. Luckily the physical combat with melee weapons is much more satisfying and visceral, although there's a durability system on them that I found hampered me fully engaging with all of the systems. Weapons wear down when you use them, and will eventually permanently break.

I suppose this is an attempt to prevent you from just finding and upgrading a potential "best" weapon, and to keep you cycling through inventory. But I found that the lack of permanence meant I very rarely engaged fully with the upgrading system. I hoarded all of my best upgrades, and finished the game having never used them - I wanted to have them safe and handy just in case, because what if I needed them later?

Honestly though, the best way to deal with mobs of zombie hordes in Dying Light, and it's biggest strength, is the parkour system. Running away from hordes of countless undead is not only pragmatic most of the time - it's FUN. The controls are fairly intuitive, and the variety of environmental interactions quite robust. And the whole thing opens up even more once you unlock the grappling hook, allowing you to quickly launch yourself up buildings and walls with ease.

The story is unfortunately a bit goofy. It plays out like a Hollywood zombie action film, rife with cliches, predictable twists, and character deaths it REALLY wants to convince you are meaningful but land with no impact. And while it's trying to play it serious and po-faced while dealing with dire situations and heavy subject matters on one hand, on the other it insists on undermining this gravitas with wacky and outlandish challenges, outfits and weapons, thanks mostly to the many DLC packs and content updates - it's huge cognitive dissonance, sometimes feeling more like Saints Row than a real horror game.

Thankfully the game does actually otherwise do a pretty good job of wordbuilding, and I found the side content to be the most interesting content to experience. Here It felt like the characters and situations tended to be a bit more grounded, a bit more believable, and a bit more relatable. Rather than the over-the-top bombast and melodrama of the main campaign, we find the stories of people just trying to get by and make it through in a hopeless situation (including the often genuinely tragic tales of those who haven't made it).

So whilst Dying Light is certainly a decent game, I still can't quite grasp what exactly it is that Techland pulled off here to earn these stripes... the enduring success does somewhat feel like it outweighs the quality. But still, what could have been a fairly mediocre or forgettable open-world zombie game is elevated here by excellent player movement systems, brief flashes of narrative brilliance, and I guess probably most importantly - the means to facilitate good old-fashioned co-op antics.

★★★★✰

Came for the incredible art style, stayed to unravel the mystery of a compelling storyline. But despite those strengths, The Invincible also has a lot working against it, and I can't help but feel a little disappointed by my own expectations after walking away from it.

The first thing that came as a surprise, and not necessarily a bad one, was how narrative-heavy a game this was. I'd expected a cripplingly lonely experience, perhaps with lite survival overtones. But instead you're almost in CONSTANT radio contact with a character trying to aid and direct you. It really is most akin to Firewatch, of all things. The dialogue and conversations are dense, practically never-ending... and whilst this could have gone badly for the game, thanks to some great voice-acting with a competent script that all feed into an intriguing over-arching plot, it winds up one of its strengths and triumphs instead. Especially when considering how affecting some of the dialogue and exploration choices can be, leading to a handful of genuinely impactful implications on the direction of the narrative.

But whilst the narrative sucks you in, it's not without flaws. Some dialogue lines and choices can feel unnatural or contrived, and overall I felt like some smaller things weren't all that well explained or justified. Also, whilst the game presents as being open-ended and inviting curious exploration, that facade often falls away to reveal the linearity of the experience in some respects. There are often invisible walls, sometimes in very conspicuous places, regularly serving to remind you that exploration is strictly limited. The most egregious case came where the protagonist discovers the existence of a "secret" place, proclaiming that they otherwise would have "never noticed it" - except that I'd noticed it myself hours earlier, and tried to explore it but was blocked from doing so at such a time.

The visuals are the other major selling point here. As you've probably clearly seen yourself, the creative direction on this game is quite remarkable and well-realised. From the UI, music/sound design, to the overall game world itself, everything comes together effectively to create a cohesive vision. The environments can be beautifully stunning, with expertly-composed vistas and setpieces combining with rich VFX and brooding music to create thick sense of atmosphere that draws you in. There are often times in the game you'll want to stop to just take it all in.

But there's also an ugly side to the visuals too, where the technical implementation seems not only at odds with the artistic vision - but seems to actively fight against it. Firstly, as is typical with a lot of modern Unreal Engine projects, the game seems to force an aggressive form of Temporal Anti-Aliasing... one that I couldn't seem to shake through in-game settings, nor INI file tweaks or Nvidia Control Panel overrides. Not only that, but through the smeary AA the game also experiences severe 3D level-of-detail and terrain tessellation pop-in, and poor texture qualities or caching - often leading to an overall blurry picture, with objects morphing and changing shape in the environment right before your very eyes. Whilst the game can often look great at a standstill, in motion it can often look pretty horrendous as a result of all this, even with all graphics settings maxed.

Then there's also just the gameplay aspect of the game itself. Whilst it may provide a little more in terms of interactivity than something like Firewatch, with a number of devices and gadgets to interface with and a fair number of puzzles and problems to solve, it really does wind up feeling more like interactive fiction than a true "game". In the end, you're going through the motions... setpiece to setpiece, conversation to conversation, with no real danger or failstate... until eventually, you reach the end of the thing. The game also doesn't really lend itself well to replay value (if you were interested in seeing where the many choice branches can lead you), as you need to sit through hours of unskippable dialogue again. I tried to replay some sections after finishing the game, but personally by that point the story had lost its impact, so I found retreading the same dialogue exchanges and story beats incredibly tiresome.

So yeah, that's about my thoughts on The Invincible. Definitely more a positive experience than a negative one, and worth checking out if you're a fan of narrative-driven experiences or rich sci-fi atmosphere. Just keep expectations in check.

★★★✰✰

I was initially hesitant seeing the "Mixed" reception here, but having played the DLC I'm pretty confused... and also saddened by what I guess was a pretty poor adoption rate, going by the review numbers and DLC achievement rates. I feel like Cyber Heist is honestly The Ascent at its absolute best.

I think the one complaint I could get behind is that the content is pretty short. Seeing reports of people finishing it in a few hours doesn't surprise me. I was playing on the hardest difficulty, so was dying quite a bit, but it took me somewhere around 6-8 hours to see & do everything on offer. With just a few main story missions and a few side missions, it feels like wasted potential with this new map they built for the DLC. I would have loved a few more quests - honestly, even if they were basic fetch quests and busywork - just for an excuse to keep experiencing this new zone.

The map itself is one of the major highlights for me, being compact and small, but densely-packed. It feels like it does away with a lot of the downtime from wasted open space of the base game, with the chaotically clustered urban sprawl containing something new around every corner. It also just looks great too, with each area having drastically distinct visual identities from each other and anywhere in the base game. It also has some of the highest enemy density in the whole game, which I personally found to be a lot of fun given how easy the base game could be.

I think the only other problem I'd have with the game is that it showers you with several new weapons over its course, but doesn't exactly leave you the room or resources to properly experience them. This DLC begins as the main storyline of the base game concludes, so unless you're planning on later starting a NG+ run or jumping into a friend's game for some co-op, you don't really get much of an opportunity to play with them.

The full price is maybe asking a bit much for the quantity of content here, but certainly not for the quality. If you're getting invested in the base game then I'd highly recommend picking this DLC up - especially if it's on sale, then it's a no-brainer.

★★★★✰

The Ascent is a decent game that frustratingly falls short of being a great game. For every aspect it exceeds at, it feels like another is executed poorly or to a sub-par standard. Whilst I came away from the game having had a good experience, I can't help but feel like I expected a little more.

Off the bat, the visuals are probably the most obvious strength of the game. The world is beautifully grim, and dense with detail and character - it's one of those games where you can regularly stop to just enjoy the view. It also runs remarkably well for just how visually complex it is. Truthfully though, as good as it looks in screenshots and videos, I personally found it to be a bit too dazzling, overstimulating and "busy". And whilst the graphics settings are a great way to adjust for performance, they aren't fleshed out enough for tweaking to your visual preferences - I had to go diving into INI files to disable depth of field, film grain and bloom, and opted to lower the game's blurry TAA in favour of video card driven anti-aliasing in NVIDIA Control Panel.

The combat is the other strength of the game. It's obviously played as a top-down shooter, but I feel also draws parallels and similarities to ARPG gameplay. Despite the vastly pulled-back camera, the gunplay feels just as chunky, visceral and satisfying as any of the best shooters do. Shootouts can be tense and punishing, but reward tactical play and effective build & loadout choices. But countless times I found problems in combat with the game's camera - it loves to constantly wrestle control away from you as the player by shifting and panning the camera around at certain vistas or point of interest for artistic effect, but almost ALWAYS at the cost of combat awareness. The amount of times this happens while enemies in range are shooting you from off-screen is infuriating.

There's a lot of interesting lore and worldbuilding in the game, but most of it is relegated to a "codex" log of written entries. These are pretty interesting, and worth a read if you have the downtime... but in reality, that's quite an ask in an action-heavy game. Whilst they make some light attempts to deliver this information through environmental storytelling and a bit of in-game dialogue, for a majority of my playthrough I didn't really feel much of a sense of place or purpose with the game's overarching plot. And whilst it pens itself as an "RPG", that only goes as far as the action aspect of gameplay - don't go in expecting any kind of complex story, branching narratives, or deep character development.

As a continuation of that last point as well, the game also has a LOT of spelling and grammar errors, or subtitles that just don't match the VO audio. It speaks to a wider problem where the game really just generally lacks a lot of polish. It could almost qualify for "eurojank" if it wasn't so visually impressive, and the combat so well-oiled. The UX of some of the menus and gameplay systems/features is woefully inadequate, and trying to generally navigate the game's world with its awful map menu and buggy quest waypoints is sometimes an exercise in frustration. The audio levels feel totally out-of-whack, and it took me hours of playtime to find a balance that felt good. And for a game with cosmetic customisation, it loves to make it impossible to see what you actually look like - these menus & scenes often being poorly lit and obstructed by environmental objects.

In terms of my overall gameplay experience, I didn't find the game to be all that long and felt somewhat unfulfilled upon completion. I played almost the entire thing on Hard, the highest difficulty, because I was finding it to be a breeze - and for context, I'm not all that incredible at games, I usually just go for normal/default difficulties. The difficult spikes were all over the place and inconsistent though, and for the final game encounter I'd kind of progressed/built my character into a corner and had to drop the difficulty for a remote chance of success. It took me around 28 hours to finish everything in the base game, another 6-8 for the DLC campaign, and then a few spare hours allowed me to leisurely clean up the last of the achievements for 100% completion. I wanted more by the end of it, and in most co-op games I would probably just jump into casual public matchmaking for some variety. But bafflingly enough, the game doesn't HAVE any public matchmaking - your options are solo, or private co-op with a friend.

The Ascent had the foundation to be a legitimately incredible top-down shooter/ARPG experience, and honestly it's still genuinely impressive given the tiny size of the team behind it. If the camera didn't regularly try get in the way of gameplay, if the menus & map/navigation were more well thought out, and if it generally had some of its rougher edges rounded off, it would be a very easy recommendation. There's still definitely a worthwhile game here waiting to be played, but it just requires a bit more patience and forgiveness than some may be willing to give it.

★★★✰✰

A remarkable psychological horror game. Whilst it may be a short experience, it's affecting enough to pack a significant emotional gutpunch that makes it worth checking out.

Largely a first-person "walking simulator" style of game, it's heavy on the narrative - so expect a lot of reading. Luckily it's incredibly well written, if a bit confusing with it's constant jumps between past and present events from chapter-to-chapter. It revolves around small but fleshed-out cast of 5 characters who find themselves stranded on a freighter floating through deep space, damaged from a collision with an asteroid. The gameplay chronicles the unease of this crew leading up to the incident, and their utter unravelling following it. To reveal any more would be venturing into spoiler territory, but rest assured it's just about as hopeless as you would expect... and probably far more harrowing.

I do have some issues with the game. It resorts to a lot of those cliched, typical horror game tropes that you've probably seen before - elongated corridors, things changing behind you, etc. Sometimes they're clever, but often they wear out their welcome. There are also light puzzle elements, but some of them are frustrating to figure out, and personally I feel like took me out of the game a bit. For some of them, there are things that should in theory be glaringly obvious to the character you're playing as, but aren't explained to you as the player.

The art style is also both a strength & a weakness in my opinion. It's a striking and well-executed rendition of PSX graphics, with a more modern degree of texture detail and colour treatment. But I feel like the forced pixelation impedes somewhat on the actual gameplay experience. I actually found the visuals to give me a bit of motion sickness and nausea, as it was hard to discern any focal points amongst the crunched-up pixels. They've set up game files to make it incredibly easy to lessen some of the dithering post-processing if needed (as well as adjust your FOV) which helped a bit, but perhaps a persistent crosshair dot for accessibility would also have gone down well. It also seemed to occasionally chug & stutter with frame drops, despite being played on an RTX 4070 TS... not sure what was going on there, exactly.

My issues were relatively small in the grand scheme of things, though. Mouthwashing leaves a profound impact, and I still think it's more than worth checking out. Just be ready to be put in a grim headspace. I initially thought that it would make for a great film/TV adaptation... but no, this is one of those narrative experience games where your direct involvement through the interaction TRULY adds to it.

★★★★✰

BIOMUTANT only just about scrapes by with a thumbs up and recommendation from me. I'm usually pretty fond of lightly broken, somewhat budget games from scrappy underdog studios. Even though they can often be half-baked, I find they're also usually where some of the more original or interesting experiences are to be found.

I think I've pretty definitively found where I could draw the line though, with BIOMUTANT straddling it just slightly on the side of tolerable. If it was any clunkier and jankier to play, or any less intriguing & distinctive in its presentation or ideas, then it would lean pretty definitively into being a more overall negative experience.

I think this game can be afforded a lot of forgiveness given the meagre size of the development studio behind it. If they had the resources of any other AAA open-world game developer, we probably would have had an absolute winner out of it. But instead, it serves more as an example of poor scope management - with developer Experiment 101 seeming to bite off more than they could chew, spreading themselves too thin, and only just about crossing the finish line to deliver something of a complete product.

It largely takes the form of a pretty typical open-world adventure game, played in third-person with kung-fu & gun-fu inspired combat that you would expect from an Arkham or Assassin's Creed title. The combat itself can feel stodgy and unresponsive with stiff animations, but simultaneously too floaty and wildly unpredictable as well. The open world is repetitive, chock full of busywork and copy/pasted locations. And the overarching narrative is hokey and childishly presented, undermining any messages it's trying to convey - I don't think there's ever been such an insultingly pointless morality system in a game ever.

The game does have its appeals, however. The crafting system for weapons allows you to create and customise some truly goofy and joyous combinations - not only in terms of their gaudy visuals, but sometimes their behaviour too. There are also glimmers of greatness in the open world exploration as well, with a plethora of genuinely surprising secrets to discover (hidden amongst the slog). And whilst I found the game's overall presentation and art style to be pretty garish, almost migraine-inducing at times, it's also charming and kitschy in a way I can't help but admire.

Honestly, I can't really give BIOMUTANT any kind of hearty recommendation. It's a very hard sell, when there are open world games out there which come far closer to hitting the mark in terms of execution and polish. But it possessed enough character to spur me on, even going for 100% completion. Get it cheap if the visuals intrigue you, but otherwise you aren't missing much if you give it a skip.

★★★✰✰

Scorn is probably going to be a pretty hard game to recommend for most people, because the thing it struggles the most with is actually being, yenno, a videogame. It kind of meanders between being an environmental puzzle game, and a survival horror - but with such scant gameplay, it's often even labelled a walking simulator. Although at least in those moments of downtime, the horror dressing still poses a persistent sense of tension and threat.

But with Scorn, if you get it then you GET it. It's primarily going to appeal to the kinds of people who have taken one look at its presentation - the promotional art, screenshots, videos, and so on - and decided that they need to experience this, no matter what form it takes. Unlike the gameplay, which can leave much to be desired, it completely delivers elsewhere in its style and atmosphere. Scorn is absolutely a triumph of artistic direction and execution.

A fairly short experience, my playtime here covered two somewhat leisurely playthroughs. If you're into more artsy gameplay experiences, and are keen on the idea of some kind of gruesomely interactive artpiece experience (in the style of greats like H.R. Giger or Zdzisław Beksiński), then Scorn is going to be right up your alley. But whilst the puzzles can get you thinking, and the combat encounters can keep you on your toes, those who require a more robust and well-rounded gameplay experience will probably want to give this a miss.

★★★★✰

Chernobylite is not exactly the type of game that I expected going into it. Like many others, I made an assumption based on appearances and drew comparisons to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series - just apparently with base building as well. But the end result is something a bit more unexpected, and distanced from that.

In the moment-to-moment gameplay, it does actually generally draw a number of parallels with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games - throwing you deep into the Chernobyl exclusion zone to sneak around scavenging for resources, all whilst contending with supernatural sci-fi occurrences, and trying not to get into fights you can't win against the local mercenaries & monsters. It feels a little more casual though, as whilst the tone is very much on point for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it does also sometimes feel closer perhaps to a Far Cry game.

The comparisons kind of end there, however. This isn't really an open-world game, for starters - in the opening moments of the game you establish a home base, and from here you fast-travel out to various predefined zones around Pripyat to complete story missions and side objectives. These maps are fairly open, but on a much smaller scale that a typical open-world game, and much more contained to themselves. They're kept fresh by randomised resource drops, shifting environmental conditions, and evolving setpieces and story circumstances.

At your home base, in between each mission, this is where the "base building" comes into play. Starting as a bit of a barren warehouse, you kit it out with crafting stations and upgrades to better help you out on the field with the increasing difficulty. It becomes a balancing act of providing enough power and a clean atmosphere to accommodate the crafting required for your gear, whilst also trying to make it hospitable enough for your recruited companions so it doesn't impact their psyche and performance out on missions.

The game is also a LOT more narrative-focused than I was expected. You aren't a faceless and voiceless protagonist, but rather a fully-voiced character, with a well-established backstory and motive. More than almost every game out there, this one bears the right to claim "choices matter" - with a hugely complicated web of narrative branches that can drastically affect options later. But also unlike most other games, it does have a lore-friendly method for revising your choices later, which does take the weight out of them somewhat.

I'm also just genuinely impressed with the performance and presentation of the game. For something of a larger-scale indie game, it has strikingly rich and detailed visuals but ALSO runs really well out of the box, with a wealth of game & graphics options to tweak if you need. I'm fairly sure I experienced a few small bugs, but nothing I can particularly remember, and generally had a very stable experience with no crashes.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Chernobylite. It mixes a few disparate gameplay ideas together way better than it has any right to. And whilst it doesn't exceed at any of them, and they can at times feel a little shallow, that also means they don't feel half-baked or overstay their welcome. The Farm 51 didn't spread themselves too thin here - they had a vision, a scope for how to best achieve it, and frankly they nailed it.

★★★★✰

I really like what they were going for with Pacific Drive, but the performance and stability of the thing has just been a massive letdown for me. The atmosphere and style of the game are incredible, and the gameplay loop is unique and intriguing, but I gave up any hope of running this thing properly on my system.

My i9-13900K CPU exceeds any listed specs, so I have to presume it's the fact I'm running it with an RTX A4000. Gaming on a workstation GPU isn't ideal, but it still typically benchmarks well above the min spec, and honestly not even too far from the recommended ones. Especially when I consider how well it handles games that seem much more demanding (both technically and visually), I have to suspect that there just wasn't the budget or expertise for optimisation in this game here.

Every time I thought I had a good configuration of settings, where I felt like the performance was an alright compromise for the amount of things I had to lower and disable, I'd suddenly hit a sequence or area that the framerate would tank again (sometimes below 60 FPS). I tried everything - and short of turning DLSS to ultra-performance, and turning all settings to low (including removing all shadows and minimising effects) this game was just NOT going to stay much above a constant 60 FPS. And the result of that all was that it looked pretty awful.

I also had major stability issues running in DX12 and crashing when interacting with objects - one crash even straight-up shut my entire PC down. I only finished one mission in my playtime, between these crashes and trying to tweak the settings for performance. This is because it has limited checkpoints and saves, so after crashes I just had to replay large sections of the game over and over. DX11 provided a much more stable experience, but at the cost of even worse performance in terms of FPS.

I'd love to check this game out in future on a different GPU (assuming that was even the problem) but unfortunately I just currently can't enjoy it without way too much compromise.

★★★✰✰