Recent reviews by ChrisTX

I find it very unproductive that people just review bomb this game. There's things that didn't work out well in the past, like the PvE concept they wanted to bring out big in OW2 not panning out or the fact that OW1 received no new content from 2020 onward to the OW2 release in 2022. Sure, but neither of these things affects the state of the game now; the experience that players get. Furthermore, it's not like Blizzard intentionally let PvE fail or anything, but it just became clear that it's not a workable concept. If you try the optional Invasion mode, you'll quickly see why it didn't.

Moreover, OW1 needed a refresh. I know people will be all mad about 6v6 vs. 5v5, but the fact remains that in OW1, queue times for 6v6 shot up because nobody wanted to queue tank and the player base wasn't there for having two tanks. They discussed that in detail in a blog post a few months ago, I don't need to reiterate the point here. But it's also worth noting that a lot of people joined the game only with OW2 and never experienced 6v6 and are perfectly happy with the game as it were.

Then there's the removed Assault mode (2CP), which is now only accessible in custom games and the arcade. 2CP was just a bad game mode, it was unpopular and so unbalanced that even during OW1 times, two maps had to be removed from the rotation because they were so damn awful. Nobody wants that back.

OW2 also increased the number of events per year significantly and is way faster and reactive in bringing balance fixes and new content when compared to OW1. So that's not it, either.

No, the main reason people are upset is because they feel the monetisation changes with OW2 are worse than the lootboxes of OW1. Okay, look. I understand that skins are expensive, and heck, these collaboration bundles go for 50€ and more. That's a lot of money no question - but it's industry standard. Lootboxes have come under much more scrutiny in recent years, both from popular perception and legally. This model of outright purchases is honestly less abusive than having to gamble for skins hoping there's something for you in there, or for a character you even play. The free lootboxes of OW1 times weren't there because it was charitable, they were there to make you want to spend money on getting more rolls. Is that really what you want back, lootboxes? Then there's the battlepass. It's perfectly in line with what other games charge, usually has good content, you get enough prisms for a mythic skin each season, and there's free premium currency in there that would allow for buying the pass every other season without spending a penny on it.

I'm genuinely having a good time with the game, and I'm sorry to say it, but I can't agree with any of the review bomber's points. It feels to me as if old OW1 players are mad about things changing that had to change inevitably.

It's a very promising game, I'd say, if they keep developing it. At the moment it's an alpha, and you feel that. Performance is rough, and I say that with an RTX 4090. There's also only one map in the game right now, and very little variance in terms of weapons. Additionally, the game is completely buggy, there's map bugs, the reputation system seems completely broken, and randomly increases and decreases reputation (??) even if you ace all your contracts. There's no tutorial or guidance either.

Yet, the basics are there. It's a promising sapling. For the price it's fair, I'd say, and you should definitely note that the developers in the description announce that they plan to retain early access for at least 2 years. Hence you can imagine how early this alpha really is.

KE🅱️A🅱️/10

Dragon's Dogma is quite frankly a very quirky game. It's rough around many edges, but it's at the same time incredibly unique and strangely enough, fun. The way you can climb monsters to stab them in their weak points is incredibly satisfying. Very much recommended to give this one a bash.

Day of Infamy is a truly unique and exciting World War 2 shooter. It's quite challenging in PvP or PvE, with the right settings, and nerve thrilling when you get a kill or take fire.

At this point, the game is only still kept alive by a small community that gathers every weekend for fun matches. Yet, the main issue now is that with the Windows 11 24H2 update, the old 2018 BattlEye version that is included with the game causes an instant bluescreen or complete freeze of the computer if one tries to launch the protected version. It is possible to launch the game without BattlEye by going to the game folder and launching `dayofinfamy.exe` or `dayofinfamy_x64.exe` directly. Naturally though, this prevents you from playing on servers that require BattlEye. It is possible for server owners to disable the requirement, and the popular Kim Jong Un servers for example allow playing without it. Yet, in order to do this and remain in the official category of servers (the custom category is something nobody really looks at), a modified engine on the server side is needed. If you encounter servers that still require BattlEye, try to contact them and ask them about removing it.

Unfortunately, New World Interactive hasn't touched the game in years. The "tours" feature that allows for resetting one's rank and grinding for more skins has been broken for years now without any response or efforts to resolve the problem on NWI's side. There has similarly been no response to the BattlEye issue.

TL;DR Game is still playable, very fun to play on weekends with full community servers, but it would really need some effort on the developers side by now.

Highly recommended. It's a game with simple rules that can be both, relaxing and challenging.

The Talos Principle is an amazing first person puzzler experience held together by a story building on elements of philosophy. However, if you're looking at this game, you probably know that already. Yes, one could summarize a recommendation for this game as: "Liked Portal 2? Get this.". In all honesty, it is damn good.

Instead of reiterating the same things everybody says about this game, I'd like to present maybe a more differentiated opinion, discussing what I did not like - make no mistake, the game is fantastic and I'd recommend it without hesitation, but even such games have flaws. If you're just wondering whether you should buy the game: Yes; yes, you should.

In this case, you're being presented a puzzler with distinguished rooms, between which you can switch and which unlock you sigils that you need to progress. Essentially these sigils are tetrominos that form sets which in turn once completed can be used to unlock new parts or to open doors.
My problem here is that these tetromino puzzles sometimes permit a logical approach implying certain symmetry relations or similar, so you can solve them using a determined strategy - but most do not. Especially tetromino sets consisting out of 14 parts feel rather tedious and time consuming, as they detoriate to a matter of trial and error, and ultimately trigger frustration.
More precisely, the messenger's abodes have four or more sigil sets, of which some are very large. Given the reward, a single messenger's tip, that helps you with ONE puzzle chamber, I do not feel that difficulty is justified. Solving four tetromino puzzles in a row doesn't exactly make you want to solve more of them: They just turn annoying.
Had they eased on that components I feel the game would have had a somewhat better pacing.

Nextly, some puzzles later on just become tedious. Especially those with multiple mines in them can be frustrating as a single misstep will result in a reset. Moreover, the recorder part is demanding a large deal of concentration. It's very well possible messing a recording because you forgot to carry out one single step or had a bad timing on another, requiring a new recording and consuming time. In general, I like the part but felt it was never genuinely difficult to see how they want you to solve a given a puzzles, but rather the difficulty was in actually recording that solution properly..
It's a bit weird as some extra puzzles introduce some new mechanics unseen in the main puzzles. Again, it appeared to me the game would have profited from taking these mechanics and moving the tedious extensions in the extra puzzles instead. Oh well, there's a grey sigil puzzle named "Nerve-Wrecker" - which is really a very appropriate description thereof.

Furthermore, a lot of text - both from QR codes and in-game messages - is 'enciphered' by just showing their ASCII representation in hexadecimal numbering, for example "I like 54 49 54 53!". I don't see the purpose thereof: Either you are technically adept enough to know what ASCII is, in which case this is something you translate maybe one of the messages and then ignore that or it is just confusing. There are some easter eggs related to this, but given the vast amount of text encoded in this form, you are very likely to miss them.

Lastly, I found the collectible stars being too easily missable. They can be hidden anywhere, inside and outside of puzzles and some stars can only be seen if you are in 3rd person mode. It took me quite some time to notice there was such a thing and even longer to learn that the increased vision thereof makes some stars unseen in the first person view visible. As of such, if you've missed a star, but have already solved all puzzles in the given world, you're bound to revisiting things you've already seen. This is even more problematic, as there are 30 stars in total and with 10 stars you can unlock an extra puzzle world, of which there are 3. So, if you want to visit all extra puzzles and complete the grey sigil set you need to find every single star. This is made worse by the fact that three stars are hidden outside of any puzzle world and thus cannot be located using the panels indicating the amount of stars/sigils of the respective world.

Even more problematic is in my opinion that some stars are being hidden by arbitrarily arcane mechanics. Some examples:

• There's a star accessed by connecting two invisible laser connectors. A cryptic QR code in the vincinity of the star is supposed to tell you that you're being expected to take a connector out of another puzzle and connect the two points with it. I learned this by peeking in a guide and even then had trouble finding the exact spots due to their invisibility.
  
• One of the stars outside of any puzzle area is also hinted by a QR code. You're expected to align properly between two points and then walk over an invisible bridge. Problem? This again requires precision. I tried the hinted solution when I passed there the first time but slightly missed the path apparently. Later on, after considering a guide, and knowing what I was supposed to do, I tried it several times and succeeded ultimately.
  
• A rather early star puzzle is hinted by a QR code that the in-game reader does not decode. The game actually expects you to use your own smartphone, then decode the ASCII code in there giving you a date and a time. Around that, there are columns aligned like a clock and numerated where you are supposed to press the ones relating to the time. However, the clock is segmented in an unusual way (the incements are 1/20th, iirc) so you're supposed to enter the time hinted in that QR code by pressing the buttons of columns that would yield the nearest approximation to it.

I've listed these three examples for a specific reason each: The first two ones give you no indication that the the solution is what the game expects you to do. Since they require precision, it is very well possible for the player to discard the actual solution as not being what you're supposed to do. The last one is very unmotivated. Given the aforementioned ASCII flood, why would you bother to decode exactly this single message? It's somewhat specially placed, but still very possible to dismiss it as some easter egg or bug rather than a puzzle. I mean, it was the only QR code not partially concealed by foilage that did not decode: I seriously thought this was a bug.

My ultimate impression all things considered is that they wanted to squeeze in as many puzzles as possible. Per se, that would be a good thing but tieing them all in with the story and with extras leads to the aforementioned issues I have with the game. Furthermore, the story feels at some points badly paced because small fragments that progress the narrative are separated by long puzzle sequences.
While playing the game, I felt this giving it some pacing issues. What I mean is that the story would have could have also been presented with much smaller sets of sigils. Since you unlock the last part - the platform - with sigils of world hub B, world hub C consists only out of acquiring red sigils without adding a significant amount of new core ideas. Had they cut it down to say fewer worlds per hub and extracted the other puzzles in some extra unrelated to the story, I suppose the story's occasional drought periods would not have been there, while the game would have provided the same content, just in a different arrangement.

My primary problem with the game is that I feel a setting in Afghanistan for some 'bum bum shoot'em up' in which you're playing a US marine that is somehow John Rambo is neither appropriate nor fitting the story told by an awful voice actor.

Basically, you can survive dozens of shots without being effected by them in any way, while every single enemy is immediately killed. Oh yeah, if you get hit, the game paints some broken glass sprite on your screen...
In fact, I found grenades and cover overrated because of your insane gunpower killing all enemies with a single mag and continuous fire.

Did I mention the QTEs? For some reason they felt they had to add some... problem? Most aren't QUICK time events, but rather stuff like press 'space' to jump over this crate... It's okay, take your time, there's no need to hurry. I'm not a particular fan of QTEs, but asking the user to press 'space' or some other button to continue is not a great thing for any game to do...

Summary: Graphics are fine, sound is dreadful. Gameplay is boring and very repetitive. It's not exactly terribly, just boring.

Postal is a very special game, that is hard to compare with others. Some focus on it's (possible) violence and could even compare it to for example Manhunt for its morbidness - but that's not what the game is about. In fact, nothing prevents you (it even earns you a special rating) from not injuring anyone at all. If you like you can go Postal, though.

Crucial elements to the game are its own humor and a tremendous amount of jokes below the belt. It caricatures certain groups like video game protestors and many others by various ways - one could even say that the brutality itself is an element of that caricature.
Other than that, the absurdity of many aspects of Postal 2 make it even more of a blast: It's for example possible to smoke catnip or to eat dog food, which will heal you by a small amount.

Despite its age, Postal 2 received major updates with vast amounts of new content recently. They're very careful about resolving issues of the game and actually listen to your feedback or bug reports (see the respective thread in the forums for example). Such customer interaction is rare in the gaming industry and I can only compliment that level of commitment for their fanbase.

Overall, I strongly recommend to try the game; it's experience is unique - and is going to improve even more in the future.

P.S.: Postal III is unrelated to that game. Please do not judge Postal 2 by what you heard about Postal III or the other way round. For more details, see the "RWS Explanation" here[runningwithscissors.com].

It's an amazing game, akin to The Incredible Machine. With 140 official puzzles and 100 different parts available, you can create a huge variety of puzzles or just contraptions, should you prefer to do so. Furthermore, the Workshop integration ensures a vast amount of user-generated content is available as well.

Short: If you liked TIM, you'll like this. I requires some creativity, but it's pretty fun to assembly complex machinery.

The 1.0 release of the game is in comparison to the Early Access version very stable and has seen a lot of thorough testing which means you're getting a very mature title now. They've done a great job polishing the UI and the parts' graphics in the recent months.