Recent reviews by 'vermillion

Consider this a "Mixed" review, instead of straight up positive.

Oblivion is, and always has been, an experience that anyone who is into RPGs, or Skyrim, should make. The world is huge, there are a lot of secrets to find, and (if you care for that kind of stuff) a lot of interesting lore to be discovered.
But the main weaknesses are still there, the biggest being the leveling and progression system.

As you level up, so do your enemies. This results in you effectively getting weaker, with each new level, plus its also a bit immersion breaking to see bandids strolling around in some ridiculous high end armor at the higher levels.

On a technical level, it's really bad.
The game is flickering for me, and no matter your hardware, the UE5 stutters that we've all come to love are a very serious problem here.

I'd recommend waiting for a sale, or at least for some updates to first fix the technical issues.

I hunted about five to six monsters in the first six hours, despite the difficulty being very low and monsters dying incredibly quickly.
The pacing is just horrible, and you're constantly forced to go on sluggish, unskippable, long rides through the area for no apparent reason. It really makes you appreciate how, in the older games, you could jump straight from one hunt to the next without being bogged down by an annoying and frankly uninteresting story.

On top of all that, there are also some technical issues.
While overall performance is fine on my RTX 3080, sometimes textures don't load properly, and shadows flicker in certain areas, especially in the first village you visit.

I know it's kind of like beating a dead horse at this point, and I'm still in what I expect to be low-rank quests, but it feels like this game is even more dumbed down and easy than Rise, which already felt like it was made for kids, at least until the last few DLC quests.

You can just mindlessly spam attacks since the monsters don’t deal much damage, and getting hit isn't really something to worry about. But even if you were to run out of healing items, you could easily restock them indefinitely.
This kind of ruins the whole gameplay loop of grinding for better gear if you can get by just fine with mediocre equipment.

This DLC is more comprehensive and expansive than 90% of full price games these days.

Easily 50h+, if you want to explore all the secrets, complete all story lines and beat all bosses.

The performance is pretty rough, even with a high end system you'll probably have some stuttering and occasional drops to below 60 FPS in some regions, and it's still very hard to follow all the questlines and very easy to lock yourself out of them, so no 10/10 from me.

Just like the base-game, it isn't perfect, but overall, it's absolutely worth it, and a no-brainer for anyone who already enjoyed the base-game.

From what I can see, better than Cities Skylines 2, in many ways.
Performance is much better, simulation also isn't (as) broken as that of the sequel and generally a lot more little details in this game that are missing in the new one.

For example, when houses are being built, the game displays a complete animation of the building process, in CS2, it's just a crane on the grass, until suddenly the finished house pops in.
Same with forest fires, the trees actually burn and turn black, in the new game, there's a fire effect, but once it's gone everything still looks perfectly fine, nothing is being burned.

I really think, for now, this is the better game in many ways. Especially with some mods, there really is no reason to get Cities: Skylines 2 over this.

Performance is pretty poor on PC, both graphics card and CPU utilization remain fairly low, yet the game barely ever feels smooth when playing offline. Online it does perform fairly well, seems like the AI is really slowing things down for single player.

But the biggest issue is the penalty system. In multiplayer, you're being constantly bumped into, and quite often you end up receiving a penalty for a crash you didn't even cause and had no way of avoiding. As of right now, I wouldn't recommend multiplayer races at all. Even with an S safety rating, everyone is constantly crashing into you, often gaining an advantage while ruining your race, without even receiving a penalty.

The chance of actually finishing an online race without some bonehead yeeting you off track is pretty much zero, not fun.

I can see potential here, but as of writing this review, I absolutely do not recommend this game.

If it was an option, I'd give it a "mixed" review.

There are a lot of quests you can do, and even the main Story is actually more interesting than in previous Bethesda titles, but overall, it still feels like there's less content here than with the other games.
I'm about 100h in, which is more than I get for 99% of games these days, but that's about it, feels like I've done and seen pretty much everything.

I'm sure there's more to be seen, somewhere, but with everything being so far apart, and procedurally generated, it just doesn't make sense to just "go out and explore", like in Oblivion, Skyrim or FO4.
In that sense, Starfield feels more like an ordinary game than a Bethesda Open world. Sure, technically you got thousands of open worlds, but in reality, you got a handful of Buildings and dungeons that are spread randomly over procedurally generated landscapes, constantly repeating themselves.

It's a decent game, just not a decent Bethesda game.

Hands down the worst add-on for the worst MH title ever made..

I went through all of it up to the final boss, and some of the stuff that comes after it, with mostly my high rank gear because it's still good enough.
The game has just been made way too easy and has been so damn casualized for mass appeal that is just isn't a challenging fun game anymore.

With the next title in the series they should ditch all sorts of stupid gimmicks, simplify the combat system, give monsters more HP and make monsters hit hard again. Elden Ring has shown that a game can be a massive commercial succes despite or even BECAUSE of being challenging.

Not a fan.
Kind of tedious to move through all the tiers, and the big appeal of being a huge, detail rich open world goes down the drain when the world is just a rather boring platform in the sky full of orange tracks. I can see people enjoying it, but I'd much rather have had an add on that maybe brings a more realistic map and a lot of cars.
There's barely any current gen vehicles in this game at this point, especially when it comes to german and japanese brands. For most models we got the last gen at best, would've been better to focus on that instead of making yet another deal with Hot Wheels.

Absolutely addicting.
Compared to factorio organizing and neatly placing things is much more difficult since you don't have an overview from above, but other than that I got to say I enjoy it quite a bit more. There's just a lot more room for creativity, decorating and designing your factories.

By far the worst and easiest MH title to date, don't expect hundreds of hours of fun like in older titles, because there really is no endgame and no reason to farm for better gear because even mediocre gear will easily manage to kill the late game monsters within <15 minutes.

Too many silly gimmicks, no more challenge. Just mindless spamming of attacks gets you through every fight as monsters barely do damage compared to older titles, and if you really suck you can teleport to camp and get an infinite amount of healing items.

Sometimes the appeal is in the challenge. Not every game needs to be made easy to appeal to a broader audience, hope capcom will be able to realize that at some point, but until then...