Recent reviews by Victoria

This may very well be the most fun I've had playing a co-op game with my wife. Puts Nintendo games to shame. Each time Hazelight puts out a new game it's bigger and more refined than their previous effort.

I also really appreciate how polished everything was on launch too -- Split Fiction runs well without shader stutter and it has good working native HDR and 32:9 aspect ratio support. Playing this game on a 32:9 display is truly the way to go, because then each player gets a full 16:9 area to themselves!

It's everything I hoped the PC version of this game would be. Sad it took 14 years and we had to deal with it running and looking like garbage on the peasant boxes for so long. But on the bright side, we got the following as rewards by having to wait so long:
+Native HDR support
+Native 32:9 support
+Great performance at high framerates. No issues with getting this game running at 7680x2160 resolution w/ 120+ FPS framerate.
+No stutters
+Improved draw distances
+Flawless controller support

Throw those console discs in the trash because this is now the definitive version of the game by far.

I never expected Ubisoft to give this cult classic any additional support. Originally released during a dark time for PC gaming, the early 2000's through early 2010's, when there were numerous PC versions of games released with technical problems or missing graphical effects that often rendered them inferior to their console counterparts, if they even got a PC version.

It's so nice to finally have a good PC version of this game that just works out of the box with widescreen and full controller support. The new textures are great and they make playing through a 2003 game in 2024 a much more palatable experience. The gameplay definitely still holds up. It's also so nice to have a ~12 hour to complete, Zelda-like story game with such a unique atmosphere that doesn't overstay its welcome. You just don't see a lot of games made like this anymore; it seems like everything now is a grindy, open world, crafting and microtransaction filled, padded out & repetitive mindless gameplay loop "games as a service" slop. Even recent entries in the Zelda franchise have been damaged by modern game design; Breath of the Wild and its expansion pack, Tears of the Kingdom, take hundreds of hours to complete. No game can be that long without being positively crammed full of low effort filler content. I have thousands of games in my library -- I don't need one title monopolizing hundreds of hours of my time.

There's also lots of wonderful behind the scenes content and an additional quest to tie the game into its upcoming sequel. So I think it's fairly priced for the amount of new development work that was put in.

As always, ignore the butthurt pirates who are whining that they can't play it because it has Denuvo. Pathetic.

These developers censor their game's forum which has earned this game a NEGATIVE REVIEW from me. Congratulations on your negative review, 2K/Supermassive Games. You deserve it.

As I posted in their forum (and then promptly had censored), this game suffers from an annoying array of technical issues. This is not acceptable for an Unreal Engine 4 game that was released in 2022. It's absolutely unplayable out of the box until you run at least FOUR DIFFERENT modifications on it:

1) RoseTheFlower's ultrawide patch, to eliminate the ridiculous pillarboxing of the game's 2.35:1 aspect ratio image into a 16:9 display area on 21:9 and wider monitors, as well as expand the image on monitors wider than 21:9. If you play this game on an ultrawide monitor without any modification, you're going to have black bars on all four sides of your screen and your gameplay area squashed into a tiny rectangle in the middle of your monitor. This is just ridiculous behavior for a developer to specifically make a game with an ultrawide, "cinematic" aspect ratio, and then have zero accommodation for people with monitors that were designed for this aspect ratio! It reminds me of Beyond Good & Evil's original broken PC release, with that game running in a 16:9 aspect ratio but being force pillarboxed into a 4:3 area, and having no support for native 16:9 screens. It was stupid behavior back then and it's stupid behavior now. Anyways, you have to open this third party tool and activate it every time you launch the game in order to fix it, which is annoying. Why is it so hard for professional developers to accomplish something that community members can accomplish?
https://github.com/RoseTheFlower/UltrawideIndex/releases/tag/thequarry

2) Placement of crash bypass files into the game's executable folder, so the game doesn't crash when you run mods to fix these devs' ♥♥♥♥.

3) Special K mod, to add HDR support. There's no excuse for a AAA UE4 game to not have HDR support out-of-the-box on PC -- the engine natively supports HDR, and a game like this, set mostly at night, with various effects -- fires, flashlights, headlights? Of course it looks a million times better with HDR support. HDR support should have been a top priority for devs to have had implemented.

4) Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker, so you can disable the horrendous looking motion blur, depth of field, film grain, etc. effects present in the game. Properly developed games include the option to disable these various ugly post-processing effects right in the game's graphics menu, but you won't see that here. Even editing the Engine.ini file to permanently disable them doesn't work like it does in most UE4 games. Nope, here you've got to manually run UUE4 Unlocker every time you start the game, unlock the console, and punch in r.MotionBlurQuality 0 in the console.

5) Oh yeah, guess what? They have a pointless 2K Games Launcher bundled into the game, so when you launch the game through Steam's shortcut, it doesn't open the game. It opens this stupid second launcher which you then have to hit the "Play Game" button on. But guess what? If you do that, some of these mods don't work. So actually, you have to run the game's executable directly. But if you do that, Steam doesn't detect you playing the game, and you don't get any achievement support. So first you have to launch the game through Steam, then let the 2K launcher pop up, then ignore the 2K Launcher completely, then run the game's executable directly.

So basically, in order to play this game properly, when you first install it you have to 1) install Rose's crash fix and Special K in the game's executable folder 2) Start the game and get Special K configured optimally for HDR 3) Close the game then make a shortcut directly to the game's executable on your desktop

Then every time you play it you have to 1) Launch the game through Steam 2) Ignore the 2K launcher 3) Launch the game's shortcut on your desktop instead 4) Open Rose's ultrawide fix tool and enable it 5) Open Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker and unlock the console, disable depth of field, and film grain 6) Paste r.MotionBlurQuality 0 into the game's console

It's the most amount of technical babysitting I've seen in a 2020's era game.

Along with It Takes Two, this is a game every couple should play. Recommend playing it on a 32:9 display though -- the forced split screen the entire time is annoying. At least on a 32:9 monitor you get a full 16:9 half to yourself.

They should have an option to disable the forced split screen because there are plenty of us who have gaming PC setups with our S.O.'s that feature side-by-side monitors and dual desktops. There's no need to enforce a split screen view in this scenario.

Very impressed. Has possibly the best gameplay of any of the erotic games on Steam. It beats out many of the normie tier 2D action-platformers in the gameplay department. They nailed everything from soundtrack to character design. I wish more developers put this kind of care into erotic games but the Steam adults only section is almost all asset flip low effort cash-grabs. I applaud FlipWitch for being different and setting a new standard for quality in an adult game.

All the negative reviews aren’t exaggerating. It’s not another case like Forspoken which was actually a good game but it was just trolled by incels and racists. It’s not like the review bombing of The Last of Us, which is another great game but it couldn’t run well on potatoes so butthurt third world peasants got upset over it.

From a technical perspective this game runs fine and should play okay on potatoes. The problem here is simply that the gameplay is trash. This game is not AAA. While it meets some basic technical criteria you’d expect from a AAA title like native HDR & ultrawide support, every other aspect of the game is underwhelming. Aside from the nice looking HDR, the graphics look more like a launch PS4/Xbox One title than a 2023 PC game. The AI is terrible. The open world is empty and not fun to explore. The quests themselves are boring and generic as it gets: go here, find a key, open a door, fight some zomb- I mean “vampires”. It doesn’t even have animated cutscenes, instead telling the story via still images thag look like storyboards created before animating the final cutscene.

Redfall is like a really bad clone of Back 4 Blood. It’s got that same ‘designed for co-op’ feel as Borderlands, Gotham Knights, Dead Island 2, etc. with absolutely none of the fun or polish of those games. Seriously, this game makes Gotham Knights feel like a game of the year contender. Everything about Redfall screams ‘low budget’, which doesn’t make any sense. It’s a high budget $70 game that feels more like a mediocre indie game made by a small team. I felt like I was playing an alpha build of a game that isn’t supposed to have its final release for another 18-24 months from now. You shouldn’t feel like you’re playing a brand new Steam Early Access game when the product costs $70. I’m just thankful I received it from an Nvidia bundle because if I paid for this game specifically I would have refunded it.

Perhaps I will revisit this title in a couple years after it’s had tons of patches and any DLC all finished and attempt a co-op playthrough with my wife. Maybe Arkane will be able to improve it from being a ‘bad game’ to being at least ‘average’, but I’m skeptical. I doubt they will ever be able to bring this up to the quality level of other ‘designed for 4 player co-op’ games. What a tarnish on Microsoft’s brand; they should fire the suit who signed off on releasing this game in this state.

I’ll just share my YouTube video so you can see how this game runs for yourself. TL;DR: The negative review bombers on Steam are full of ♥♥♥♥ yet again and the game runs fine on decent PCs. Why does anyone still read Steam reviews?

https://youtu.be/uUidgj7h1y0

Forspoken is an isekai title starring a young woman from New York City transplanted into a fantasy world suffering from a severe cataclysm. As she comes to learn the truth of her origin, she acquires a wide variety of magical powers; traversal-based, Earth/rock-based, fire-based, water-based, and illusion-based spellsets all become as you progress through the game. Forspoken bears similarities to game series like Infamous and Prototype but manages to one-up them with a much larger ‘battle mage’ moveset than any of these games. Forspoken also brings to the table a much larger game world to explore and much better graphics than these older titles in this genre.

Forspoken gives you plenty of opportunities to play with your powers beyond the main questline, with a very large map filled with side objectives. It’s similar to a Ubisoft game in this way, which isn’t necessarily a positive thing, as Ubisoft frequently gets flack for putting too much collectable busywork in their games. The key difference between Forspoken’s ‘busywork’ and Ubisoft’s ‘busywork’ is that zipping around the game world as a parkouring battle mage is a lot more fun than slowly moving around one of Ubisoft’s worlds as an assassin. Athia’s geography is also much wilder than geography found in a game such as Assassin’s Creed Origins, and there are also substantive rewards to many of Forspoken’s sidequests; including new unlocked spells, stat increases, new outfits, and additional lore. The game also has a surprising amount of 3D platforming; some of the side activities are quite difficult to get to and require getting good at jumping up mountains. If you're a fan of 3D platformers, and 'collect-a-thons', you'll probably like this game too. It is not strictly just a "kill enemies with magic spells" game.

The graphics of the game are overall very striking, though there are some issues. In particular, not as much care was put into the New York portions of the game; thankfully, they are quite short and limited. The capital city of Cipal also has a very washed out look to it and is just overall not a very fun place to spend time in. There is sometimes a jankiness to the game’s animations. All of this can likely be attributed to the Luminous Engine being old and more obtuse than a game engine like Unreal that a lot of newer games use. On a high-end PC, we experienced no major issues with the graphics; the game has highly detailed, high resolution textures throughout; no stuttering, and performance was solid for the level of visual fidelity offered. Forspoken has native HDR support, and support for PC exclusive features like Nvidia DLSS, DirectStorage. It even has native support for 32:9 super ultrawide monitors, though sadly cutscenes are pillarboxed to 16:9. It has native controller support and button display for Xbox and PlayStation controllers, and it even supports the DualSense features of the PS5 controller when used wired. PC is definitely the platform to play this game.

Sadly, not all impressions of the title have been positive, largely owing to an agenda being pushed by misogynist and racist gamer demographics well before the game was even released, as well as a demo that does not sufficiently showcase what the full game is like, and a high price tag while simultaneously utilizing an uncompromised DRM which means that the game cannot be pirated, limiting how much positive word-of-mouth can be generated for the game. Forspoken can therefore only be played properly by spending $70 which is unfortunately something that few are willing to do for a new intellectual property. Forspoken has likely sold worse than it deserved to sell due to this confluence of factors.

Forspoken does suffer from a slow-paced opening, requiring about 2-3 hours of gameplay before you can defeat the first major boss of the game (‘Tanta Sila’) and greatly expand your moveset and traversal powers. Once this task is accomplished however, the gameplay opens up considerably and the game overall becomes much more fun to play, as you now have many more options at your disposal to get around the massive world of Athia and engage in battles with more exciting fire-based powers. Forspoken features a wide variety of terrain, with massive mountains, floating platforms, and beautiful color palettes that vary by region. If you can stick it out until you get expanded magic powers, you should be in for a good time.

A frequent complaint you might observe about this game by the right-wing crowd is that it is too “woke”. Apparently, because the main character isn’t just another generic white man, they assume this game is meant to be some sort of left-wing American political piece. In truth, there is nothing political in the game. Frey’s status as a mixed-race, half-black woman is never even acknowledged by Frey herself or the other characters in this world; it is simply considered an irrelevant attribute of her appearance by all she comes into contact with. There are actually no racial or ‘LGBT’ politics anywhere in this game.

Forspoken has a refreshing feminist undertone not seen in other video games. It is perhaps the most woman-centered game I have ever played; the protagonist and the main antagonists of the world of Athia are women, and in this game there isn’t a single cutscene that features just two men talking to each other. Frey’s love of cats is a consistently visited topic in the game; as an impoverished orphan, her pet cat ends up being the only one she loves in the world prior to being transported to Athia, and there is a sidequest activity where you collect up to 20 ‘familiars’, which are magical cats that have a variety of different attributes – unicorn horns, wings, the ability to float. Jewelry and fashion are how you can upgrade how powerful your spells are, with different cloaks and necklaces able to be collected around the game world. There is even a mechanic in the game for painting Frey’s nails, which provide her with different stat boosts depending on which designs you pick. Nail painting for enhanced magic is an element I’ve never seen in a game before and it really is quite a clever idea for a battle mage game. Forspoken somehow manages to pull off being a fantasy tale about strong women without having an ounce of ‘man-hating’ feminist politics in it, as the few male side characters who are present are portrayed positively as beloved members of the community.

While I have a positive impression of the title, with more than 35 hours of gameplay logged, it should be noted that most impressions you will find of this game at this point are from people who have only played the demo or who have not even played the game at all; indeed, many “professional” reviewers didn’t even play the game outside of rushing through the main quest as they need to meet deadlines and move on to other games, but much of what there is to enjoy here involves exploring the full world with your full set of powers and doing a variety of the side activities. Reception to Forspoken will likely become more positive over time as it receives discounts, enabling people who wouldn’t pay $70 to actually play the full game and see for themselves, and trolls get bored and move on to newer games, with only those who have actually played the game remaining on forums related to it. While Forspoken might not end up being ‘game of the year’ material, it is assuredly a good, above average fantasy game that does not deserve the amount of hatred and mockery it has received on social media.

Really enjoying the game. Graphics are gorgeous; the gore and death animations are next level. I never feel bored exploring this prison and the game doesn’t wear out its welcome at a length of 10 hours. I appreciate the accommodation of my 32:9 superwide monitor; this game has *good* native support for ultrawide monitors with no black bars during gameplay or cutscenes. And the HDR is some of the best I have seen on PC. This game should be a go-to reference title for any gamer with an HDR display looking to show off what it can do.

As for what I don’t like about the game; it does seem shockingly badly optimized with a framerate that’s all over the place. I have an RTX 4090 and a 12900K so I’ve become accustomed to games running quite smoothly on ultra settings at native 4K or 5120x1440; this game regularly dips down as low as 30 FPS even on this setup. The anti-aliasing solutions provided with the game are also absolutely abysmal and make the game look like a blurry mess, but turning them off reveals serious jaggies. I don’t appreciate this company taking AMD’s money and blocking DLSS on this title because AMD’s FSR solution just can’t compete. The only way to get this game looking as good as it should look is by using Nvidia’s DSR feature to render the game above your display’s native resolution; but of course that ends up tanking the framerate even more. Expect this game to be a 30-60 FPS title on a RTX 4090 if you use DSR to make it look sharp without egregious jaggies.