Recent reviews by Senrab

I shook the Rat. I am the Ratshaker.

Not nearly at the end yet, but I'd like to give this game a shout-out and a recommendation for how much fun my wife and I are having with our "co-op" playthrough of this game. Taking turns taking notes, reading the letters out loud, and working together to decide which way we want to go and what we want to do next has been a lot of fun, I'd call this a couch co-op game if not for the fact that only one person actually controls the game. I'd definitely recommend it as such.

I want my day back.

The most 8/10 game ever made. A masterclass in the idea that a game can be more than the sum of its parts if the foundations are solid. Not for everyone, yet likely enjoyable by anyone. Confident in what it wants to be without stretching itself trying to become something it's not. A reminder of the seemingly long-gone "AA" game market in terms of scope and feel.

"Recommend" is the wrong word. Do I recommend this game? No, not really. Am I enjoying it? Yes, a lot. But I have weird tastes and am deliberately looking past this game's numerous flaws to feel that way. It'd be disingenuous to say that means I recommend it to others, but it'd also be wrong to give it a bad review when I'm enjoying it as much as I am.

So I guess the answer is, yes, I recommend it to weirdos like myself who like to watch little blips on the map move around and make number go up. I recommend it to people who liked Elite but wanted a single-player experience they could influence more effectively, and don't mind sacrificing Elite's clearly better visuals, sound design, flight model, and multiplayer. I recommend it to people who heard that some people play EVE without ever leaving a station and thought to themselves "gee, that sounds fun!" I recommend it to people who can encounter weird, annoying, if not mission-breaking bugs and say to themselves "♥♥♥♥ happens!"

Do I recommend this to most other people? No.

And yet...

CPU: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700K 3.61 GHz
RAM: 32GB DDR4
Video: Nvidia RTX2070

Performance is this game's biggest issue right now imo. I'm not the kind of person who considers 30-40fps "unplayable" but it's definitely disappointing. I'll average 50-80 in the open world but the moment I enter a populated city it drops considerably. There might be some form of memory leak going on too, as performance seems to drop after a few hours of play. All in all, it runs worse for me than Elden Ring did, and Elden Ring never exactly wowed me with its performance on my hardware.

That said, the game itself is a blast. The combat is different enough from other third person action RPGs to feel fresh. Characters move a bit floaty which takes some getting used to, but long term this works well with the games loose respect for gravity. Working with your pawns' strengths paired with your own is satisfying when you hit a good sense of synergy.

I love wandering around the open world on my own, hunting for treasure, killing large monsters, and camping out during the night. The wide distances between locales is probably going to be a divisive point for a lot of players, but I was the kind of guy who spent hours riding around in RDR2 hunting so it's right up my alley.

I have no comment on the MTX for this game. Capcom sucks like that for all their stuff, I'm not going to buy any of it but I'm also not going to let it get in between me and enjoying myself. Maybe all the backlash will get them to reign it in for future titles.

If my opinions change I'll update this review, but for now I'm giving it a thumbs up.

This rocks. I've never played an AC game before, and am not normally a mecha fan, but everything about this game is flashy, fun, and thoroughly enjoyable. I'm also very very pleased with how well this game runs on my machine, and how well it plays with mouse and keyboard controls. Normally, I'd use a gamepad for Fromsoft games, but this one seems to work excellently either way.

Highly recommended to any of my fellow Fromsoft fans, regardless of your opinion on mech games. This one is just plain good stuff start to finish. Its initial campaign took me somewhere between 15-20 hours, which is really refreshing after the multiple 100-200 hour games we've had over the past few years. NG+ has substantial changes to the campaign that make for great replayability, so there's plenty more to do once the credits roll.

Yes it's as good as you've heard. Yes it's also just a 4 player coop shooter with randomized environments and bonus objectives. What makes DRG special is it's strange and eclectic community which has, barring some *VERY* rare and specific examples, been a joy to play alongside. This game is just as much fun with randos as it is with friends. Just remember: Leave no dwarf behind, and if you don't Rock and Stone you ain't coming home.

Welp, there goes my productivity.

I really didn't expect to get addicted to another Souls game after all this time, I thought I was burnt out. But Elden Ring somehow did it.