Recent reviews by jd641

I can only speak as a someone who only plays the towers in MK games and not people, so if you only care about online and ranked matches then my review won't be at all helpful.

The SP story is great, it's engaging with lots of references to older games and the live action movie that made me smile whenever they were brought up. Although cheesy at times, I thought this was the best story they've done and the way they finish it opens up MK's future titles to be anything they want.

As for the towers... if that's what you care about don't buy this game. Most towers have random modifiers that make every round a freaking nightmare. Unlike in Injustice 2, the round modifiers only effect you, so if there's an electric floor or a giant laser beam filling the screen, it will only hurt you and not the AI. Your AI opponent also gets anywhere from 1500 - 4000 health vs your 1000 plus the AI's modifiers refill almost immediately so you can get spammed over and over by some stupid missile that freezes/shocks you into a stun almost constantly while they AI takes out your health in 6 seconds.

You can now use modifiers of your own to try and even the odds but they're all one time use and the recharge rate to use them is 1000% slower for you. So you want to try and combat those fire floors and unblockable laser beams that are destroying your health? Too bad, you can only use the armor and health modifiers once every minute. Sadly if you need a specific modifier, you can't just earn it, it's completely damn random so you may have 20 of them or 0.

If you like customization, there plenty in the game, most stuff is found in the krypt but some of it is tied to the Towers of Time. There's also plenty of gear to unlock, but in order to have that gear at it's full potential you need to "level it up" so you can add augments to them that are rewarded randomly. To make it even more convoluted, each piece of gear's augment slot if randomly assigned so you earn an augment you can't use, you can spend in game currency to have a chance at re-rolling the augment slots. So if you have 50 pieces of gear to unlock, you need to level up each one and you may have to spend currency for each one to get the augment slots you want. It's like some horrid PC/mobile game BS hybrid.

The amount of different currencies in this game is idiotic: there's koins, hearts, souls, time krystals and some other nonsense I think, and it just makes earning frustrating and beyond a grind.

As a tower player I definitely do not recommend this game, the towers in their current state are abysmally unfair and not fun. If that's what you care about, don't buy the game now and wait to see how they handle this. If things are fixed I will change my review but for now, it's a no.

Rise is one of those games that you know you will enjoy if you liked the first game in the rebooted Tomb Raider series. This time the graphics have been improved to the point that I can safely say that Rise is the nicest looking game that I have ever played, it's not only the environments, it's the facial animations and expressions that Lara emotes throughout the game. Faces and emotional expressions have always given emotionally driven video game characters issues but CD really nailed it this time, Lara looks like a person and it's amazing to see in motion.

The game play imho has been improved quite a bit since the first game: combat is smoother and using stealth to attack entire groups is now much more intuitive and rewarding. Gunplay is improved with better overal handling of weapons and the addition of several types of weapons per class brings a lot of needed variety.

If you're expecting the game to be more than 50% tombs you're unfortunately going to be disappointed. There's a lot more raiding of ancient tombs/caves in this second game but a lot of them aren't nesassary to explore at all to finish the main story line and if you're a fan of some of the older TR games you may find the ones with puzzles to be a bit easy. With that said, there's a lot of exploring to do both in and out of the main plot and plenty of ancient artifacts to collect on your way throug the game.

If you get a bit tired of the main plot there's several options to pass the time outside of your saves, you have four replay modes which allow you to go back to completed chapters and get high scores to earn credits for cards and compete with your friends for the best scores. My favorite mode is Endurance mode which isn't included in the base game but it's available in the season pass and as a separate dlc for $9.99. Endurance is really self explanatory, you get dropped off at a location where you will need to hunt for food, keep your body warm, ward off enemies and explore ganerated tombs that are full of traps. If you die that's it, it's game over and you'll have to start again... this mode is extremely addicting and you can go a single session as long or as little as you'd like. If you don't want the season pass and the Baba Yaga dlc doesn't sound interesting to you, I highly recommend this mode.

As a side note, the extra outfits that are being sold as DLC can be crafted in the game if you don't have the season pass, you won't get the additional card packs for the replay and Endurance modes but if you don't care about those then save yourself some money and just craft them.

This game is hardware resource heavy and to enjoy maximum details you're going to need a modern and very beefy system. My current hardware is a 3.5 ghz Xeon 1246 V3 with 32GB ram and a GTX 970 with settings maxed out I average 20 fps in some places, the lowest I get in other games at max settings is 80 - 90 so it was a bit of a shock to see my system slow to a crawl like that. For Win10 users, DX12 support has recently been added in and for nvidia customers an exclusive Ambient Occlusion mode has been added in as another AO option that so far looks to be the most accurate I've ever used in a game.

I definitely recommend Rise to anyone who's a fan of the new reboot franchise, I've already put in 70+ hours into this game and I'm not even close to not being amazed.

The base game is great but what matters is that support for Mortal Kombat X on the PC is finished and the console versions continue to get patches and updated netcode. Unfortunately there's going to be no updates, no more additional content and no more balance changes made to the steam/pc version which basically makes it abandonware.

Do not buy this game if you expect further development or feel that WB Games decision to drop PC support is unforgivable, and definitely do not pay full price for this game.

Borderlands 2 took everything they did right from Borderlands and made it even better. From game options to gameplay, everything has been tweaked to satisfy a greater audience and they did it without dumbing down much of what made Borderlands so great.

With the three DLC's that have been released so far, you will have a lot more variation in scenery and gameplay if you get bored of the main story line. Pirate Butts is a medium length story but the end missions will usually pay off with some amazing loot. Some people complain about reskinned enemies but there's plenty of new things that keep it visually interesting. The new weapons are definitely unique, some of them are considered "cursed" which can give them amazing bonuses but they will have a drawback that can be just as devestating to you as the bonuses are to the enemies.

The Torgue DLC is filled with the great comedy that made Borderlands so memorable and the final raid boss is amazingly fun to fight unlike Gee in Pirate Butts. Seraph items have actually become useful in this one: For grenades, the O-Negative, Crossfire and the Meteor Shower are simply amazing and replace some of the legendary gear for sheer mass destruction. The Hoplite is the seraph equivalent of the Fabled Tortoise with less of a speed impact, so technically it's even better and should be used over the FT. Oh yeah, EXPLOSIONS!

Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt is a rather short DLC but it takes you to a very different part of Pandora. Instead of wastelanads you visit an underground oasis for rare and unusual (for Pandora) animals. While the main plot isn't too long, there's plenty of side missions to keep yourself busy with. The seraph dealer has found some amazing weaponry this time like the new Interfacer which is now the absolute strongest shotgun in the game and The Hawkeye sniper rifle. The Hawkeye may be weak for body shots, it has one of the highest crit bonuses for any sniper and has great accuracy. The vast manjority of enemies are new and there's a returning enemy from Borderlands which may or may not make some people rage. Along with the missions you will get a new vehicle, new heads and new skins to customize your character and a terribly designed raid boss with unavaoidable shock novas.

Borderlands 2 is worth picking up if you're a fan of the original game and it's often silly humor. Just be warmed, you may lose track of time very easily so don't play this before work. :P

CarSim4000 is an amazingly fun and addictive game full of mayhem and rediculous action. What other game would you purposely go around in and jump into oncoming traffic?

If you really want an immersive and time consuming co-op game that's just as fun to play in single player, than Borderlands is it. The artistic style that Gearbox produced from the Unreal Engine 3 is spectaular and it makes the game's unique design seem even more impressive.

The four DLC's each add hours of gameplay to the main story line and allow Borderlands to have replayability for a very long time.

What's better than killing fools? Nothing.

It's Hamburger Time!