Recent reviews by Pope

Interesting cookie clicker style game, with an analog horror style story line going in the background. Look forward to the 2 hour Youtuber essay about this that will undoubtedly come out.

All in all, good enough to kill a few hours, tho personally it wasn't incredibly memorable.

Ignore the time in game, I've been playing daily since Global launched and as a GFL1 fan, this game rocks.

First off, it's great seeing all the girls coming back in amazing 3D quality. Seriously, they knocked it out of the park with the models here and not even just for the gooner content. The guns, gear, and animations all looks fantastic and sell the world so well. They even have very well done cut scenes in game that hype the action up to another level during important story beats. If you're here to goon tho, there's plenty of that as well. Definitely seems like someone on the design team is a foot guy, because the feet are incredibly detailed and every girl has a feet up pose in the dorm.

As for gameplay, it's X-com. If you like that sort of gameplay, you'll enjoy it here. There are no miss chances, and there are more skills to play around with as each girl and can play into team comp very differently.

On the Gacha side of things, this is probably one of the most F2P friendly gacha games I've ever seen. I enjoy spending money to see numbers go up, but my friend can't afford to pay anything and thus is entirely F2P, and so far he's kept up with me nearly entirely besides not having some girls at their S6 (Meaning they haven't pulled multiple versions of the same girls 6x), however they have all the same dolls I have at pretty similar stat numbers. In game materials are also all F2P friendly for grinding. Obviously if you want to whale on energy to grind more, you can, but I haven't done that at all and I have 2 squads maxed out with near BiS on their attachments. PvP, which is actually just fighting the Ai of other player's teams, is also all F2P friendly. You can reach top 10% every season if you have half a brain and level a squad to decent stats.

Since global dropped a little over 2 months ago, I've been excited every day to hop on and do my dailies. I just can't wait to have my 404 girls back. Especially my wife 416.

I pride myself in completing all these sorts of test of will/masochism games. Something about losing progress that took you 20 minutes, or 30 minutes or sometimes hours, taken away from you because of a split second mistake. Something about that feeling calls to me. The developer and the game seems to want me to quit, to get angry and stop trying, but there's a strange sense of power I feel picking myself back up and trying again despite knowing I will fall again. And as you pick yourself up over and over and over, in most of these games you can feel your skill increase incrementally, until you're at the end of the game, and your abilities are almost unrecognisable from where they were at the start of the game. All of those highs I chase by buying and completing these painful experiences.

This game however is lacking in a lot of what makes other games of the genre so good. There is very minimal increase in skill from start to finish. You will get better at handling the boulder sure, but it doesn't take much to master. This game isn't about getting incrementally better until you overcome all the obstacles, it's more of a very large test of patience. The game is so boring at times that you will make mistakes simply because you are so painfully bored of staring at the rock that you stop to scratch your nose.

You could view these faults as fundamental to the game's experience. And in a way I would agree with you, but at the end of the day I hope anyone who buys this and attempts the challenge knows that you are getting yourself into 5-12 hours of a boring grind. Sure the excitement of summiting the mountain feels sweet as it does with all these games, but the journey is far from entertaining.

I will however still recommend this game to any who are fans of the masochistic Getting Over It inspired genre. It may not be very fun, but it does do what it seeks to do, and that is to create a painful experience that most will fail to complete.

Bought it on my day off and ended up playing it all day and all night. After an almost 12 hour session I am hooked.

This game is exactly what I wanted: a new and polished co-op horror experience. While the horror aspect of it does where off quite fast admittedly, the game never gets less intense, and the desire to progress my character and collect more cosmetics/decorations for my room keeps me coming back for more. I played with 3 friends for half the day and had a blast, and played with randoms the other half and still had a blast.

If you like Outlast, co-op games, or are just looking for something new for you and the boys to dig into, give this one a try. Totally recommend.

This is unbelievable. 3 separate times in 2 days I have tried playing this game, and each day I get hit with this Mountain Error code that kicks me out of the game after 20 minutes and then says I've been disconnected form Ubisoft servers and am unable to reconnect.

I paid money for this game to own this game so I can play it when I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ want to. I am shocked that this is the state of gaming. I can't even play the product I paid for because their game won't let me connect to the servers. Servers for a single player experience.

If you're an RE fan and liked Village, this is a no-brainer pick. It's a good story with Rose, that builds on her character and offers some fun fights and spooks. Yes it is mostly if not entirely reused assets from the main game, but seeing how it's been over a year since most people stepped into Village, It doesn't come across as tiring. If anything it feels refreshing and somewhat nostalgic to walk through some of the areas in a new way, while at the same time getting to remember the trials you went through with Village.

My main gripe, that others have also pointed out, is that the 3rd person mode is a far cry from the polish we saw with RE2/3 remake. I recently just played through RE3 remake, and the differences in camera movement and smoothness was very jarring at first. Not something you can't get use to, but for sure takes away from the experience.

Overall a solid DLC which provides more content for the RE universe. 7/10 experience all in all.

This game gets a lot of hate, and I'd understand that if someone paid full price for this title, but on sale I'd say this game is entirely worth it as a RE experience. Personally it's the best RE experience I've had in a long time, maybe even better than Village but that's a hot take.

This game is shorter than other RE titles. It took me roughly 8 hours to complete on my first run, but I am someone who doubles back constantly to make sure I have every herb, explosive and box of ammo at my disposal. The boss fights were better than RE2, but still I felt were a bit lacking. The addition of a dodge did however add a bit of dark souls esq timing and skill to them, so that made things a bit more fun. All in all I'd say this game is worth a playthrough if you can get it on sale. Especially if you're an RE fan.

Oh, and they made Jill really hot. 8/10

This game is a mixed bag for me. As someone who has been playing the Pathfinder TTRPG for about 5 years (currently DMing a COTCT campaign), I love Owlcat giving me a chance yet again to step into Golarion and interact with the world beyond theatre of mind and images. On the other hand, I couldn't stop cursing Owlcat for making the experience a slog due to the difficulty spikes you face throughout the game. It's like playing with a DM who wants you to die at times and it can really kill your experience.

Despite what others say however, I found the story to be quite well put together. I mean this was Paizo's biggest power fantasy AP they've ever done (And probably ever will do seeing how Mythic levels broke most encounters in the original AP) and it shows. All of the paths you can take in the game lead to moments that really make you feel like you're stronger and more powerful than the other characters in the game. Even going as far as to make you feel comparable to demon lords and deities by the end, however some paths got a lot more love than others. After several attempts to find a path I felt was right, I eventually made a Celestial Paladin of Iomedae and went the Angel route, and honestly it feels like that was the path the dev's intended you to go. I'm not sure if this was due to a lack of development time or what, but you can tell not everything got an equal amount of love.

It's just a shame that the game almost has to be played on an easier difficulty unless you plan to run some munchkin builds at later levels or use cheats. I said ♥♥♥♥ it by the end and just used toy box to get around the constant reloading and dying, and dropped several runs in the past due to facing a difficulty wall I didn't want to bother grinding to get past. If it wasn't for that, I'd probably easily recommend this to any CRPG fan or RPG fan, just for the sheer amount of customisation and route options, but even with 5 or so years of Pathfinder experience under my belt I still struggled at the higher levels to win encounters that I thought I was ready for.

Overall tho, the story, music, sound design, and art are all top notch in this game. I really think Owlcat deserves more praise and attention for the level of skill they bring to the table when bringing Golarion to life. I just hope next AP they do, they manage the encounter difficulty a bit better.

8/10

*Writing this review based on my experience playing through on a single-player private PvE server*

V Rising does many things right but still has a ways to go before I'd say it's a must-play. I am a big fan of vampires and vampire lore and was hooked on the idea of a game based around playing as one. However one of the biggest gripes I have with the game is its seeming hesitation to lean into the core themes of Vampirism. While there are surface-level mechanics that play around the fantasy (Sunlight hurts you, you need blood, etc etc), I would have loved to see more focus on what makes being a vampire so cool. Things like: enhanced physical abilities, actually making use of your fangs when feeding or in combat, running water being a hazard, the ability to summon wolves or bats, lurking cities in disguise and luring people into dark alleyways to feed on them, vampire hunters tracking you down after you murder a village. While yes you do get some cool vampire powers and have to be wary of silver, holy symbols and garlic, everything implemented doesn't have any depth. Ultimately by the end of the game, you don't feel any stronger as a vampire for having killed the final bosses, you're only stronger because your gear is better. And that is where I feel the game fails. In a fantasy based around vampirism, I should be getting stronger based on my supernatural abilities and not my shiny weapons and armour.

Speaking of the bosses, while I feel many of the bosses in this game are very fun to fight solo, that starts to fall off near the end of the game. They didn't intend for anyone to fight the final 3 bosses solo as they are incredibly long-winded and punishing fights that you need to play nearly perfectly for 10 minutes to not die. They really should have considered toning down boss power or buffing players for playing solo to make these fights more doable. Sadly, however, after clearing the bosses on my own and completing all the PvE content available, I was met with a hollow victory. I didn't get any powers for clearing the fights, only beacons that give you reusable temporary buffs that would have only been helpful when I still had bosses to fight.

After about 35 hours I had the final tiers of weapons and armour and had slain all the bosses in the game. Those 35 hours were fun and had some memorable moments (apart from having to run across the map constantly to bring things to my base), however, I find it disappointing that they provide 0 endgame content apart from PvP. I have nothing to do now and will probably be deleting this game from my library until a chunk of new content gets added.

While I haven't mentioned many things that make this game good, I don't think you need my take on them to know. This game is Valheim. It's Rust. It's Minecraft. It's Terraria. It's Conan Exiles. It's 7 Days to Die. If you liked any of those games or the games like them, you will like this game's gameplay.

As someone who put a large amount of hours into SWAT 4, this game is everything I was hoping for.

The bones of this game are astounding and I can't wait to see this game's mechanics and content evolve. But there isn't a large amount of content to play through so far so keep that in mind when buying the game. You'll stop seeing new things after around 10 or so hours.

One thing I do hope the devs work on is the AI of the enemies and the civilians in the game. Occasionally they will fire at you through walls where they have no way of seeing you. They also have super human reaction speed and aiming at times, so they will one 180 one tap you and your teammates within seconds, tho not always. The civilians also seem to act completely randomly at times. They will refuse to drop on their knees despite 4 officers shouting to get down, and even continue to run despite being pepper sprayed, bean bagged and beat. You're telling me the average person can shrug off 3 beanbags to the ribs and sprint across the map?

That aside tho this game is shaping to be something amazing. Looking forward to the future.