Recent reviews by omni

An incredible turn-based strategy game with great writing. The story, mechanics, and levels are all well-designed and the characters are compelling. All of the playable characters have unique movesets that interact in interesting ways. This is one of the first games in a while where I was invested enough to care about what happens to the characters after the game ends, which I did not expect from this genre. The mixture of humor, military conflict, and relatable interpersonal conflict is well-balanced.

I bought this two days ago and have already played 10 hours with friends over two nights. Great game, would stay up until 3 AM refining oil to extract sulfur byproducts to make sulfuric acid to mine uranium again.

It took me a couple of hours to get into this game and I find the social aspect of co-op with friends essential to enjoying it. The proximity-based in-game voice system is critical to the experience; not being able to communicate with other players when they're out of earshot or dead (unbeknownst to you unless you find the body) creates very dynamic uncertainty in your group. The behaviors of the different monsters all tie well into creating stressfully fun emergent co-op situations.

Highlights of my first session (three players total, two streaks over four hours) included:

* A tense attempt to escape a weeping-angel-like enemy (called a coil-head) with one player maintaining eye contact with it to protect everyone and walking backward while another player at their back calls out which way they should walk while trying to find the way back to the exit. This was going okay until the navigator missed a jump between catwalks and died, leaving the remaining player blind to where they're going while still staring at the coil-head.
* Learning the hard way not to visit a moon with a foggy weather advisory after getting so terribly lost that one player fell off a cliff and I could only find the remaining player by following the sound of their voice and asking them to blink their flashlight on and off.
* If you find yourself telling your friends that "I'm just going to look over here, I'll be back in a second", then in true horror movie fashion... you might not, in fact, be back.

I recommend starting in a group with at least one person with existing knowledge of the game to explain things as you go. The gameplay mechanics are well-suited to being explained by a friend as the situation arises.

This is not a Souls game, but if you appreciate the traditional difficulty level of FromSoftware games and want a completely different experience focused on fast-paced combat, dogfighting in 3D space, frantically flying, dodging, and firing four different weapons simultaneously then you're in the right place.

The difficulty curve is good. It starts off at a relaxed pace and every new seemingly overpowered build you discover only dominates temporarily before tougher enemies make that table stakes and require skillful execution. Builds in this game are much more flexible than in Souls games (even more so than in Elden Ring) because the mechanics for purchasing weapons/parts and upgrading stats are all reversible and trivial to reallocate on demand. I frequently end up switching to completely different builds to suit each mission.

I went into this game blind without having watching any of the trailers and enjoyed it. The quality of the main story varies from an extremely polished cinematic experience to just average at different points in the game. The side jobs are excellent and many of them offer very thought-provoking exploration of the implications that the world the game is set in has on society. There are also a few separate categories of smaller "gigs" and "sightings" which are all handmade but generally short self-contained single-location heists/hits with no custom dialog except at assignment and completion, which I found to be much better than the randomly generated filler fetch quests that many games have.

I recommend hitting everything in the game in one playthrough and I don't consider this game to be very replayable. I spent 50 hours on my first and only playthrough, doing all of the side jobs, most of the gigs/sightings, and reloading from the endgame point of no return a few times to do most of the endings. I mixed stealth/guns/melee frequently in a single playthrough without needing to respec.

When I started playing for the first time, the game consistently crashed immediately after character creation. After researching this, I disabled raytracing (which had been enabled by default) in the settings menu which resolved the issue, and I never experienced any further crashes while playing. My only other technical complaint was that save/load was quite slow, but disabling cross-progression in settings (which was also enabled by default) made these instantaneous.

If you liked the original Psychonauts and want more of it, then this is what you're looking for. It is a very direct sequel. If you haven't played the previous game yet, I would get that first.

You play as a Dark Souls character with Sekiro athletics in a Breath of the Wild open world where the dungeons are traditional Dark Souls levels. It's great. The horse mechanic fits much better than I expected.

I have not had any problems with performance. Sometimes you can tell that a new area is loading by a brief slowdown, but it has not affected gameplay and the framerate is otherwise smooth.

I enjoyed the game, and I appreciate that the store page description is straight to the point in describing it. The difficulty is good; it's not insanely difficult and isn't a pushover either. The environmental storytelling is surprisingly existential.