Recent reviews by Staddy

Sehr schönes und entspannendes Spiel. Die challenges sind teilweise sehr knifflig und bieten langzeit Spielspaß. Sehr zu empfehlen!

ELEX II Is what you'd expect from a Piranha Bytes sequel. It's an improved version of ELEX with polished features. Story wise its a direct continuation of ELEX 1: You're playing as Jax who, after the events of the first game, went into "exile" because he failed to convince the people of Magalaan that an unknown alien race was going to invade the planet. 6 Years later and his little hut gets crushed by one of the alien space ships. While escaping the alien creatures, he gets bitten by one of them which effectively infects him with a mysterious disease. In my opinion the ELEX II's story is interesting as well as the characters. There are some characters that I wasnt a big fan of, but thats just personal preference, not an issue with the writing.
Biggest issue is still the presentation for me. The cut scenes feel very weird and some NPC's talk in a very calm way even if something very action loaded just happened seconds prior in the cut scene.
But thats okay, I expect this kind of jankyness from PB at this point.
Gameplay is fun. Again, some jankyness as expected but all in all a big improvement from ELEX 1.
If I can give you one advice: If you decide to play with one handed weapons, DONT use a shield as it prevents you from doing the dodging roll and instead just lets you "side step" which feels very clunky. If you play without a shield, the combat almost feels like a souls game. Its very responsive and the enemies are very readable so you can easily dodge enemy attacks if you pay attention to their attack patterns.
There is ALOT of content compared to ELEX 1. While I finished the main story and sidequests in about 50 hours in ELEX 1, it took me a whopping 80 hour playthrough to do the same in ELEX II.

If you liked ELEX 1 you DEFINITELY have to play ELEX II.

I really liked this game. The characters are very well written, the music is awesome, and the story is interesting.
It has about the same play time as the other Life Is Strange games but it still feels a bit short. Also, without spoiling anything, the finale felt a bit underwhelming.
But to be honest, I love the Life Is Strange games because of the vibes and characters and in this department this game is a gem. Cant wait for the next installment, hopefully a bit longer next time.

This game has been sitting in my steam library forever and I finally got around playing it!
What can I say? Black Mirror‘s strengths clearly lay in its atmosphere and story. Even though this game is around 20 years old, you can still feel the dense atmosphere. The devs did a good job of making the castle black mirror feel eerie but on the other hand make the pub feel cozy. The story is interesting but gets a bit too crazy towards the middle-end for my liking.
The sound design is good, I liked the music and especially the voiceovers. Atleast in the german version of the game they got top notch voice actors and it shows when you play it.

A few things I didn’t like:
-Trial and Error riddles. I’m not a big fan of trial and error and this game has it all over.
-The time system. When an npc tells you to come back after a certain amount of time all you have to do is walk across the map and come back. This feels pointless and could’ve been handled better.
-Lack of help finding missing Items.
Yes i’m a casual player and I reckon I’m not the only one that got stuck because I didn’t find a few pixel wide key on a wall. I literally used a guide after a while because I don’t have the patience to sit there and scan every single location in hopes to find that one item that I need to progress.


All in all I can recommend Black Mirror to anyone who likes point and click adventures. Its main strengths are its story and atmosphere. I’m currently playing Black Mirror 2 and will write a review for that as well once I’m finished.

Disco Elysium is by far the best book I've ever played.

This game offers one of the best written characters I've ever seen in a video game. Every single npc has it's story and purpose, and even more importantly, a distinct personality. Kim Kitsuragi, your partner in crime, feels like an actual person that you can relate to and I caught myself sacrificing things that wouldve benefited me but Kim wouldnt have liked it. Amazing game overall, really makes you think differently about RPG's in general. I really really hope that ZA/UM's next game is gonna be just as good or even better than this masterpiece. I literally cant wait.

I gotta say: Because of the overwhelmingly bad ratings it got when it came out I didnt expect such a good game when I bought Mass Effect Andromeda. I was positively surprised to find out that this game offers hours upon hours of entainment and even after 86 Hours of gameplay I still have stuff to do. I mean, yes all thats left after I finished the main story (98% completion rate) are pretty annoying fetch quests without markers but still.
Lets start with the things I didnt like:
-The first 2-3 hours. Everything felt too forced, the story, the characters and the first planet, habitat 7, where you take control of Scott (or Sara) Ryder. The game didnt initally grip me, but that all changed once you get your own ship and land on a unknown planet for you to explore.
-Bugs. Yes there are bugs. Not around every corner but enough to stand out. Most of them werent game breaking and if they were a simple reload would solve the issue most of the time. The most annoying bug I stumbled upon, however, was the fact that I couldnt save my game anymore. The "save" button would be greyed out and there was nothing I could do. Changing hub worlds didnt change anything and all I could do was quit the game and restart it -losing about 20-30 minutes of progress. That was only a one time occurrence tho, so I wont ride that horse too hard,.
-Some crew members. I didnt reall like Liam, Cora and Gil. They were boring characters that I didnt really care about up until the end. In contrast to that I really liked the other crew members, Drack was my favorite along with Peebee.
-Lack of meaningfull choices. Yes there are a few choices you have to make while playing Mass Effect Andromeda but non of them seem to have impact on the story and its ending like the decisions you had to make in Mass Effect 1-3. I dont even think a single crew member can die in this game. Which in turn just makes the game have less emotional moments (in comparison to the trilogy).

Now to the things I really liked:

-The planets. Every planet is really beautifully designed and everything just look gorgeous in the frostbite engine. It was fun exploring them with the Nomad, a 6 wheeler that can even drive up the steepest mountains. I really thought the devs would make the game more linear but they did a fantastic job giving you a sense of freedom while exploring the planets. My personal favorite was Harval but I'm a sucker for rain foresty, gloomy environments so not everyone might agree, especially because Harval is the only of the 5 explorable planets that you cant use your Nomad on, just because of how small it is in comparison to the other planets.
-The battle system. The battle system is probably one fo the most fun systems that bioware has made this far. Using biotics to start a combo and then see your enemies explode into all directions is a really satisfying feeling and I never got tired of it.
-Music and Sounds. The music was really nice. I have to admit it wasnt as chilling as the score for the first 3 Mass Effect games but its still nice music. All the other noises that biotics, weapons and even your Nomad makes sound really good. The quality of the voice acting was variable but the main character had a really good one and that was the most important to me.

All in all I really enjoyed playing this game and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who liked the first three games. Just a pro tip: when playing the game try to see it as its own game instead of comparing it to its predecessors, you'll have a much better time. I know I'm guilty of it myself, even in this review, but trust me. Once you forget what came before your experience will be much better. If I had to give the game a score out of 10 I would probably give Mass Effect Andromeda a solid 7.5 /10.
Thanks for reading my review.

Having already spent a couple hundred hours in this game before its steam release I can only say that this game is very fun, especially for those who are into Star Wars. I'm not lying when I say that this game has brought me more joy than all the new Star Wars movies combined.
If you always thought you wouldnt like mmo's because they're grindy and feel lifeless because all npc's just talk to you through a text window, this might be something to give this genre a chance. Because all the dialogues are voiced and have animations.

Only thing I wish is that they came out with new Singleplayer content more consistently and faster than the past couple months. For example, I personally only play the story. So I always have months of breaks in between the times I play it. The reason for that is that the story stops at a seemingly random point because the devs havent come up with new story content yet. This is really annoying especially because the last time I waited like 5 months and when I came back there was only 3-4 hours worth of new story updates

All in all this game is really worth at least a try out if you havent yet.

I have mixed feelings about this game.
First of all, I think this season is a worthy finale to the story about Clem. Because, let's face it, it was always about Clem. The last episode is a tear jerker and, without spoiling anything, I'm really happy about how it ended.
Now a few things I'm not a big fan of:
The fact that almost the whole season takes place in and around that school. I get that the devs had to find a final place for clem to stay and they needed do build that up properly and they also had to wrap everything up fast because you know what happened to TellTale games, but I really wish they kept the idea of clem having to survive by herself (and Ajay but I'll talk about him later) in the wild. I missed the feeling of exploring a completely new area far away from any savezone and to be always cautious about the surroundings. But here in this season it felt more like a "To do list" kinda thing where you have to get this and that and the exploring or survival aspect like in season 1 and 2 is almost gone.
The second thing that I didn't like was the characters. I didn't really like anyone in the final season (besides clem). Even Ajay was a pain in the butt. Very good written and interesting characters like Lee and Kenny are not existent, atleast in my opinion. I didn't care for Ajay or the two romantic options you get or any of the kids in the school. I despised that really unfriendly bomb builder guy tho, so atleast the devs were able to trigger me emotionally on that basis.
Talking about Ajay, it didn't feel like a real kid. Like....I dont believe any kids behave like he does in that game but then again, I never met a kid who grew up in a zombie apocalypse so I wont critize that too much.
All in all I enjoyed the game and considering what was going on at tell tale games during its development its not even as bad as it may sound from this review.
I will miss those story drivien games from tell tale games and especially the ones in the walking dead universe.
If I had to rank all seasons by how much I enjoyed them it would look like that:

1. Season 1
2. Season 2
3. Season 4
4. Season 3

Thanks for reading my review.

First of all, I'd like to say that I really appreciate the effort by both the publisher and the developer. Unfortunately this game doesn't feel like a Gothic game at all. And here is why:
Invisible walls: I stumbled across dozens of invisible walls while playing this game. Meanwhile I only remember one invisible wall in the original Gothic games (on top of the mountain row next to the pass in Gothic 2). One of the things I personally really enjoy about Gothic and Piranha Bytes games in general is the feeling of freedom and not a linear game in open world disguise. Please, if you decide to move forward with this project I beg you to remove those walls and find better solutions to keep a player from getting where you don"t want them to be!! I know this is just a teaser but essentially you should be able to go anywhere on the map without getting stopped by artificial walls.
The dialogue system: I really don't like the "fallout 4 -esque" dialogue system. It just seems lazy to me and an old-school dialogue system is just what is needed for a real Gothic game. It really seems like a downgrade to me.
Combat system: I understand that many people didn't like the original Gothic 1 combat system. I, personally, really like it but what I really cant deal with is this abomination of a combat system in this teaser. Please give players the choice to switch between an upgraded version or the old system of fighting.
Characters aren't believable and badly written: Another thing the old Gothic games did very well is the presentation of believable characters. In this teaser however Diego feels like sharp-tongued, selfless fantasy rogue who doesn't help you because he's a decent human being but to stroke his own ego. That just what it felt like to me.
Presentation: Its too cinematic. Too bombastic and epic. This feels more like the intro to any generic fantasy game than a Gothic. Make the beginning a bit slower (presentation wise), my advice is to not even change the beginning to the original at all.

Now to the things I actually liked:

The Music: Pretty good music. Of course the cherry on top would be if the developer actually hired Kai Rosenkranz to remaster his old works personally, but what they got so far doesn't sound bad at all!
The World: Apart from the above-mentioned invisible walls I really like this new interpretation of the mine-valley. Visually I don't have any issues, the game looks beautiful.

All in all this teaser does a few things right but most of it wrong. It just doesn't feel like Gothic and if the developer wont do major changes to it I think it will be a big disappointment. Please THQ dont let us down and do this right! Listen to the fans!!

First of all: I recommend to play this game on the "hardcore" difficulty, it really adds to the expirience of survival and struggles that the people in the game have. Dont worry, enemies arent bullet sponges or anything, everything just feels more realistic.

Metro: Last Light is a very intense expirience in my opinion. The Atmosphere its absolutely outstanding, I loved exploring the very detailed cities (wich werent too many unfortunately) and the worn down tunnels of Moscow's metro. Sound wise its also pretty good! everything sounds good and satisfying.
Story wise its "okay". I mean, I wish it was more focused on the conflict between the factions inside the metro as opposed to the "Dark One" story line but it is what it is.

The only real critique I have is that the game is very short. I mean I played pretty slow and I still managed to beat it in just 12-13 hours wich is pretty short, even for a shooter. Just look at the Wolfenstein games. I have 26 hours with the first one. This is about the length I would expect from a modern shooter.

Nevertheless, very solid game and I can only recommend it!