Recent reviews by Exitof

I'm updating my review after putting some hours into the game.

I haven't experienced crashes again since the first day I played. I don't know if there was an issue that appears only when you first start playing, or if I'm not trying to do the things it doesn't want me to do thereby avoiding the potential crash. I just know it involved me trying to drag individual army creatures around from one to the other.

The game does have a level of difficulty that can be discouraging when you first play it, but it depends on which hero you use. If you have a hero that has some death benefit mechanism that generates more units than what die in a battle, suddenly things get easier.

Further, as suspected, hobbling the CPU opponent's growth reduces the overpowered attacks a few weeks in that will decimate your forces and lose you the game. If you see their lesser heroes roaming near you, take them out.

In order to dissuade the AI from attacking, plop one of your own lesser heroes in camping mode at a choke point which will prevent the AI from exploring further (at least until the AI decides to attack).

I also went into several weeks after defeating the CPU just to explore the equipment system. There are levels, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Greater, and Ultimate spread out over 32 different sets:

Rabbit, Wilde, Rogue, Titan, Legend, Mesmer, Mudcast, Regal, Batal, Tusk, Bronze, Heretic, Ascetic, Assassin, Eastcay, Gladiator, Paragon, Extract, Slayer, General, Protector, Jotun, Conjurer, Echoes, Necrotic, Ruthless, Chaos, Scarlet, Mandel, Kismit, Exarch, Mithril

There are stacking benefits that start with 2 or 3 matching sets. I did finally achieve a full set with 10 matching items, but no special achievements were triggered beyond 5 items.

What's annoying is that when you pick up items, they will equip sometimes and push your favored item into the storage. This means you have to be vigilant to make sure that your items stay the same as you selected, which is cumbersome when you have dozens of items and multiple heroes.

I wound up creating an Excel spreadsheet which I had at my side on a laptop so that I could manage this better, but this whole system could be improved by allowing equipment to be locked.

The gameplay itself is okay. Essentially, there is no progression, everything is a one-off match, unlike a game like AOE in which you can follow a campaign and keep your gains toward the next map. As such, nothing really matters other than becoming more powerful than your opponent faster and nibbling away until they are gone.

It seems easiest if you just attack everything you can that gives a difficulty of "Easy" and add more forces until everything is "Easy." Defeating roaming heroes, neutral or otherwise, along the way.

Breaching forts seems to be fairly easy, even without catapults. I don't know if it's hero specific, but there is a catapult mechanism that allows you to camp near enough to the enemy's fort and bombard it with a catapult for as long as you like. I just left it running as I did a couple weeks of building up armies and when I finally invaded, the wall was completely rubble.

Overall, the game can be fun, but it doesn't require much thought. The battles are pretty much easy to let your troops do what they want while you cast summoning spells on their ranged units.

I'm not too sure about how much there is to keep coming back, but for right now, I've found a way to enjoy it.

My original review is below:

Crashed within the first 10 minutes of playing. Others posted game ending crashes on the discussion board as well. This is a buggy game that needs to be fixed to be considered work anyone's time.

Okay, I tried again and pushed past the thing that was causing the crash (dragging creatures around) and as someone else noted, the difficulty level is insane, and this is on the vanilla default settings, with difficulty set to "Normal."

Sure, I'm new to this game, and games like this need some time to get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of each hero. Also, figuring out ways to better the AI is similar to how learning that in Age of Empires III, if you send of your explorer and constantly attack the villagers, especially when building a structure, you will hobble the AI's growth. At hat point, suddenly, AOE3 gets far easier, but feels dirty doing it.

Well, I managed to win my first game on the first tiny map and was randomly given Delerium/Asce The Ruined and fought against Pyre/Kediz. It actually wasn't difficult initially, but in playing the next random game, it got far more difficult. This obviously means you have to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each faction and hero, and how best to account for each.

After spending hours building up only to being sought by the heat-seeking missle AI army, I started a new game only to find that I was complete locked in with no paths available. This shows that the random maps do not prevent this, so you might wind up playing a game for hours only to find out that you can't actually reach where you need to go.

There is an option to disable random maps, so that might the solution there.

I'm stubborn, so I will continue to fight this game for a bit longer. Maybe I'll change my mind on it later.

Alright, I panned this hard because of some initial impressions and a serious bug that caused a complete Black Screen of Death on Windows 10 Pro. But after restarting, I set the game to windowed mode and played it through.

DO NOT RUN THIS GAME IN FULL SCREEN MODE OR YOU MIGHT LOSE EVERYTHING ELSE RUNNING IN YOUR CURRENT WINDOWS SESSION.

I thought this was an old game, they did well convincing me that it was retro. One reason I legitimately thought it was an actual old game was the config uses DirectX9, which was released initially in 2002. The other option is DirectDraw 5, which is a long discontinued API. The game refused to load using DirectX9, so I had to select DirectDraw 5 to get the game to work.

Upon learning this game was released in 2016, I'm quite miffed that they didn't make this more compatible with modern computers, and for that alone I'm still tempted to keep a negative review.

So, to repeat what I yelled above, do not use fullscreen mode. I did so, and tried to switch to the Windows desktop via Alt-Tab and the game immediately caused a Black Screen of Death. I had open a couple database files, a development IDE, and many browser tabs.

I could not even break out of the BSOD by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del or Ctrl-Shift-Esc, I also couldn't use the Windows hotkeys to switch to another desktop (which I've done on other misbehaving games like FarCry 2 which seem to like to BSOD).

As a result, I may have lost some things I was working on, all to play this game for a break from work. I do not consider that acceptable, given the year this was released, and that Windows 10 is fairly standard. As such, I can not recommend this game.

All that aside, this game is a point and click adventure the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island. It does have some humor to it, but it's got more of a Life is Strange feel.

The opening was quite heavy with religious narratives, and that put me off as an atheist that doesn't want to have some game attempt to be a morality play encouraging one to find salvation. Fortunately, once I got past the initial scenes, I realized this was not the case.

The story is pretty good, definitely borrowing bits and pieces from Twin Peaks. The voice-overs were done well, there were no weak performances for the most part.

Having grown up in the advent of computer games, I remember playing Night Driver on the Commodore Vic-20, which also was an arcade game with only white blocks heading toward you and a plastic cutout overlay of a car attached to the screen.

Later on, with the Commodore 64, games like Epyx's Super Cycle captured some of the excitement of Sega's arcade Hang-On. There was also Pole Position clones like Pitstop and Pitstop II (which added pitstops as well). Accolade brought Test Drive out, using real cars and rocky roads. Also there were more like Chase HQ, Speed Buggy, RoadBlasters, each of which presented the same simplified parallax racing game genre, but with their own twists.

Eventually, on the Commodore Amiga, there were games like Lotus Esprit which gave a far better experience than the 8-bit games could.

But also around this time, there was Outrun and later Turbo Outrun, which was available in the arcade and on practically every home computer and console. The music was always an important part of these games, and I can see that the developers of Horizon Chase Turbo were influenced by these classics, the Outrun series especially.

The music definitely harken back this period, one in which music voices were often limited to 2 to 4 voices, and so music often employed tight ans fast arpeggios to give the illusion of chords. Such arpeggios are in the music for this game, a telltale sign of their influences. I immediately recognized the music in China as the same melody from the C64 classic Way of the Exploding Fist, which itself lifted the melody from a 1952 musical piece called Dance of the Yao People.

So, how does this game stand up to all of these? Does it add anything new?

It stands up well, fits like a glove for those familiar with these types of games — racing games in which you barely need to steer on the most extreme of turns and instead just point in a direction and feather the gas to steer in or out of the turn. The collection of gas and tokens is another such common mechanism.

In many ways, this is a bog standard parallax racing game, but there is nothing wrong with that and it does so perfectly. That's why I like this one, it's visually modernized, but the gameplay is classic.

I found this on HumbeBundle for $1.99 and decided to give it a shot. The first time I booted it up, I had no idea what was going on, but my flashlight was flickering, as in strobing on and off on every other frame. It was so distracting that I got nowhere and gobbled up quickly.

I restarted, and there was a crash, so I realized that my overclock (which actually is for cryptohashing) was probably too high, so I set it down to my game playing profile and the game was smooth ever since.

Upon getting the feel for this, I was actually getting a bit of a shock and scare, but it quickly normalized for me as I learned the game. It's not complex, you gather clues and then perform a more complicated task to send the baddie to another plane of existence. But the game itself is actually pretty fun.

While this is set up to be a 4 vs 1 game, you can also play solo, which is a great way to learn the game anyway. There multiplayer option I wasn't able to try out as the game reported only 14 players online when I was playing in the early AM hours. The few players that were in a game lobby looked to be Asians who were in the middle of their evening, but they never set their characters and seemed AFK. Playing some more solo, I leveled up some and checked again, but there wasn't anyone available for multiplayer.

I also bought this game along side Dead By Daylight, which is a similar type of game. I've yet to try DbD, but I assume it will be a better game, possibly simply because of the playerbase.

Ultimately, if you want to play this solo, which I'm finding fun, then pick this up. It's a smaller game, taking about 2.25 GB on your hard drive, so it won't be a storage hog to have kicking around. I'm not sure what price would be fitting, but I'm happy I only paid $1.99.

I'm not usually one to complain, but in this case, I felt it was necessary. This game is essentially a churn-fest of staggered tasks that require research and resource gathering to accomplish. Outside of that, pretty much the game is pointless other than to waste some time doing something repetitive and within a block of time.

I'm assuming there is only one end, so there are a lot of things that you could do which will have little or no impact on the game. I have no idea what lanterns are used for, but I completed the game without them. Same with the zombies, I never bothered with them, still completed the game.

One of the most annoying mechanics is that the week is split in to 6 days, and the 6 main characters only appear on their specific day, and only during the daytime. Considering that it takes a day to travel from one end of the map to the other, there are some characters which basically can only be visited once per week.

I honestly only kept playing because I just wanted to complete it so I can feel like I accomplished something in the 40+ hours it took to churn through.

The graphics are nice enough, they added some nice touches with the wheat swaying as you pass through it, but they failed to add a skin for your player once they get armor.

The inventory system is pretty good, considering you can build a large number of storage chests, but you will still run in to issues with not having enough slots, like when clearing a dungeon level. Anything that drops is persistent, so you can leave dozens of logs or rock slabs lying anywhere, and they will not disappear, though that isn't true for the dungeon levels, which makes it a bit frustrating especially when you clear out your inventory of everything except for one slot for wine.

The story is light, the characters only respond on a linear path, so once you have completed a task, it will still often show an option to talk with them which displays nothing. There are also a number of useless characters that serve to add one or two tasks, and then never can be interacted with again.

The task system is lacking, you can check which character expects something from you, but often you won't know how to actually achieve the task or source the item. It may explain it in the character dialog, but if you forgot, then you will be stuck and need to do a web search for how to do something.

Most of the things you do are checkpoints and have no impact once completed. You can clean up the graveyard, but once it has been reached, you could just destroy everything. One exception is apparently throwing bodies in the river will lead to bodies for burial coming in with worse stats than if you never threw a body in (I completed without ever throwing a body in the river).

There are large areas of the map that are pointless, and overall, the distance between points makes for some annoying situations as you can be trying to accomplish a task when a new body is delivered on the opposite side, expecting you to process the body ASAP. Fortunately, there is a shortcut, though only one. There are also obstructed paths that need to be cleared or repaired which also make getting between areas a bit more acceptable.

The tech tree requires blue points, and these blue points are some of the most annoying to gather. They come from a few trivial things, like crafting glass, but mainly can be generated through studying all the game items. Some items award large amounts, others a small portion. In order to study, though, you must acquire "faith" points by preaching every Sunday. If you are busy trying to gather resources, you have to book it back to the church before the sun sets on Sunday, or you miss out on that weeks allotment of faith points.

Several items, including many crops, are 3 tiered so that you can more easily get bronze seeds or stories, but getting silver is more difficult, and gold takes unlocking a merchants ability to sell you the good stuff. So yeah, another set of microtasks: Get merchant points up enough to open all items and grow crops hoping you eventually can get some gold seeds.

Oh, and don't get me started on the alchemy crafting, you are expected to pay a witch a hefty sum to give you formulas, or you can try random combinations of about 50,000 possible combinations. The recommended way is to use a guide like the one someone posted on Steam to save you the hassle. Yes, the goo that forms hints at what could be changed to make a valid formula, but again, it's just too much. Just give us the formulas instead of expecting us to experiment forever.

I spent too many hours today trying to finish this off and the end got far worse. I realized that once you've reached near the end, you no longer need to gather anything, farming is pointless, it just comes down to visiting character A on their day which directs you to visit character D which is 3 days away, and then character D sends you on a new mission to visit Character A another 3 days away. And some expect that you visit once a week to progress their tasks.

The actual worst was having absolutely nothing left to do expect for the remaining tasks and having to meditate for 4 to 5 minutes to cycle through the week to complete the next task from the same character. One character did this 3 times in a row, so even though I had all three items they would need, I didn't know what they would need so I'd have to run back to find where I stored it and wait a week to get the next item to them. Since I had to do this 3 times, it was basically 15 minutes of meditating (waiting in fast forward) and 10 minutes of walking between the character and my storage boxes, and about 5 minutes of dialog.

I just can't recommend this game. It took far too long to complete due to the nature of how extended they made all these tasks. Basically, you need to complete about 2000 tasks to achieve your goal, and they aren't much fun to do as they all feel like work.

I've played American Truck Simulator first, then went ahead and bought both Euro Truck Simulator 1 & 2. I've not tried ETS1, not sure if I ever will, but ETS2 is fantastic. I'm enjoying visiting cities that I once walked around. The environment is pretty convincing, and on my GTX 1060, I have everything maxed out (including rendering at 400%) and it never drops below 60 fps.

To add to it, there is a list of internet radio stations, so I'll turn on a radio station with a regional dialect to add to the immersion.

One thing that really sucks, though, is the road size. Every road is missing shoulders, and there are areas where you have to thread a needle in a right turn to get on to an on-ramp. There are lamp posts and barriers stuck right on the edge of the lines. Another less happy thing is the limited nature of large cities, you are always on the edge and can never get to most landmarks or city centers. ATS lets you drive around the casinos in Las Vegas, but no joy here in that regard.

Outside of those limitations, this is highly configurable, and it will most likely push me to buy a full sim kit with a wheel, pedals, and a shifter. Oh, and this also makes me really want to get a good VR kit. I'm not sure the official support, but I've seen players on Youtube doing it, so it is possible.

So far, I've gotten all the map DLC, except for the newest (I'm cheap and waiting for sales), and I love seeing those yellow X barriers disappearing and the map growing larger. As it is, the map is humongous. It takes a bit to drive from one end to the other. Sometimes, it's fun just to forget about moving heavy loads and just focus on exploring.

The other DLC is mostly garbage, a billion somewhat pointless custom paint jobs (which you rarely see in-game). I've not gotten the High Power or Tuning DLC, so can't speak to those.

All in all, this is a great way to relax. Just jump on the road and enjoy the journey.

This is probably one of the best games I've played. It's not all action-packed, but the nature of the game's time dynamics and pick your path makes for an extremely interesting playthrough. There are all sorts of chained events as well as nice touches that could be missed if not looking in the right place at the right time (like the mud puddle outside the diner).

This is one game I suggest to pretty much anyone, regardless of what they like to play. The story is well written, and the twists and turns are devastating. Top that with some amazing visuals and surreal environments that you'll encounter, a sure winner.

Quick note: just need to add a file to the game folder to disable the 30 FPS limit. Google it.

I originally started with Dead Rising 2 on the Playstation years ago, and decided to buy the complete series for PC. I've been playing through each of them from 1 to 4, but I've skipped 2 OTR because I just had completed 2 twice.

My major complaint with 2 was the keybinds were missing, like it was ported from console with minimal effort to support PC features. I figured out what keys are available (a limited set) and had to map via editing the keymap file in the game folder.

Fortunately, Dead Rising 3 is not burdened with the feeling it was shoveled on to PC, rather it feels native to PC. The keybinds are complete, I had no issues with selecting my own keys, and further, the game displays in-game the right keyboard hints unlike how DR2 will show WASD even if you mapped the arrow keys.

Okay, controls are really a big thing for me, obviously, but beyond this, the game is so much more what I wanted. It's an open world game which has several modes of gameplay. The standard single player mode allows you to explore at your leisure, and I never ran out of time on a mission, like the old games would do.

Some major differences, though, come from the survivors you encounter. Some just run off, but others will never leave your side. I was confused by this, as I expected to lead them to safety, but I didn't know how, so the first three that joined me died in battle. I later learned that you can turn them on or off with the Survivor Bulletin Board which exists in the 4 safe houses.

Unlike the previous game, you aren't forced directly in to a safe zone, you have to clear one out before you can use it. This added to my confusion, as you are lead to a garage which has no save points.

There are no scratch card type crafting, so you must find a blueprint in the wild or gain them through encounters. This means no trial and error combos. Another difference is that you can craft anywhere, so no more needing to find a maintenance closet. Also, there are combos of combos, which help fill out the over 100 weapon combos.

The gameplay is different. It feels like a different game, unlike how the first two were. The item selection is frustrating, when trying to pick up an object or try on a clothing item. Too often you wind up cycling between items, and worse, your posse will stand really close to you and you'll wind up swapping weapons with them accidentally as well.

The player movement seems to respond a bit delayed, same with camera moves. Once you get used to it, it's fine, but it takes some time. At the very beginning, I couldn't even figure out how to pick objects up, it seems like I had to hit pickup twice to get it to work. It got better once the intro phase was over, but still isn't ideal.

The map is a good size. It's great to have so much area to explore, but one thing that is annoying is trying to navigate past fixed barriers while in a vehicle. It's pretty much better to abandon a vehicle and hop a barrier and find another on the other side. Another plus is that the 4 areas are not landlocked like in GTA. You can go anywhere once the game begins, except inside certain buildings or the graveyard.

Another interesting thing is the persistence of the gameplay objects. Once you use it, it's gone from the rest of the game. If you move your a car, it will stay there. Some items, though, like boxes and crates, will continually respawn after you leave the area. Also, there are some crates or weapons or food that are infinite supplies. This seems like a huge problem as you'll quickly realize you can't find some objects needed for making combos you've already made. Well, here is the interesting part - all weapons you've previously held will be available from the weapons lockers in the safe houses, including boss weapons. No need to gather the items to make the same combos over and over again, just select what you want and go. Also, you can acquire skills that allow you to substitute objects within a class (blunt objects, axes, etc.), so you won't need a perfect match when using a formula.

Survivors can use some combo weapons now, which is great. Also, feeding them will not require that they give up a weapon. This is a nice change.

One flaw is the save system. While it saves without leaving the gameplay when you hit a toilet or portapotty, it doesn't seem to have slots like the previous versions. Others have also complained about bugged saves, so it would be wise to manually backup your save data occasionally.

Ultimately, this is a different game. It's not full of all the same silliness of the others, so it has a more sterile and less campy tone. There aren't big fuzzy dice to roll a 7 with to earn PP, there isn't even money, but I'm fine with this. I'd rather not play the same game over and over again with a different wrapper. I'm enjoying it.

Some have complained that the game drags. If they want, there is a mode that matches the original games pace, so the option is there. Also, this has multiplayer support, which I've not tried yet, but you can play offline as well.

Okay, so I get that people were ticked off about the original trailer eons ago that was shown before the game release. I get that people that reordered got essentially duped. That's the past, what is important is what is now.

I heard about this game before I ever had a system good enough for modern gaming. I really liked the idea, and when I finally got a new system together running with the best hardware, this was one of the games that I picked up early in to my collection.

I was fortunate, I bought it while it was on sale, paid perhaps $30 or so, and I think that was a perfect price point. I began playing without reading anything about the how to play, just dove in and wanted an experience that would progress naturally.

Well, I'm glad I did. I didn't have any expectations, and I enjoyed dozens of hours just flying around from planet to planet, exploring and seeking out new things. After a while, though, I did realize that there were a limited number of biomes, so planets start to look the same with some random variations. I also noticed that the creatures and plants all had common bases, so the variety became less noticeable too.

So, I began then to explore the missions that the game offered via the Atlas Path. I was already about 110 hours in, and I realized there was a whole lot of gameplay that was just waiting for me. Yeah, for the most part, the storyline is just some text on the screen, but it definitely added a layer to the game. It also explosed the player to important features and abilities, so I suggest getting the central story going sooner than later.

Anyway, I've clocked over 300+ hours in the game, I'm not sure how much of the "394 hours played" was active gameplay, but I'd assume the majority has been actual gameplay. I spent considerable time mapping out waypoints on my home planet, using two points of reference and triangulation. I spend countless hours keeping a log on planet attributes in a spreadsheet and noting interesting finds.

I found ways to play this game that fit my interests. Yet, there are many different ways to play this game, and that is something that is great about it. I wasn't too interested in space battles and ran from most until recently. I never bought a freighter, but after farming and crafting some valueable items, I now have my own collection of ships.

In a few days, the much awaited multiplayer updates will be live, and this will add yet another way to enjoy this game. Building will be limitless, and owning multiple bases is really going to make things exciting.

I've been trying to get something fun like this out of Star Citizen, but it's a train wreck that sometimes works and looks pretty. But now, No Man's Sky will be everything I could want out of Star Citizen without waiting years for a possible functioning game.

Very happy with the upcoming update of No Man's Sky and happy to have enjoyed the 300+ hours already. Here's to 300 more.

I've not played this game more than a few minutes, but the space required is bloated with uncompressed audio. The entire game folder is 29.6 GB, the audio folder is 17.8 GB. Really? How does this game need that much audio?

Well, it you dig deeper, there are three folders within the audio folder, "audio" is 12.2 GB, "audiohigh" is 3.3 GB, and "audiolow" is 2.3 GB.

Seems excessive that the game is 60% audio files and takes up 30 GB on your drive.

I got this game for free with an ASUS GPU.