Recent reviews by XEN0KID

100%'d at 11h, absolute visual and story masterpiece. As a 3D artist this game truly took my breath away at some points, and the story is actually a pretty good continuation considering what the first game left us with to go off of. This game is an amazing experience which lasts exactly as long as it needs to, and does not overstay its welcome (except for some of the walking sections).

Unlike other games, and despite the awkward spot the last game left us in, the plot does NOT feel convoluted with inexplicable and convenient character decisions. All plot points feel quite in-character with no glaring issues, afaic. The decision to include friendly characters is a bold one considering the first game's ambiguous relationship with "reality," as was the decision to embrace the mythological aspect of Senua's world which was wonderfully executed in the plot. Additionally the stories which the collectables tell are absolutely wonderful, with the return of Druth and a new set of collectables from the Fairfolk, which tell tales from a broader range of mythologies. My only complaint is that the latter half of the game feels a bit rushed compared to the first, especially concerning the final level. I'd forgive it leaving us with a very ambiguous and esoteric ending as Hellblade being Hellblade, but the lack of collectables and additional content, and the visual quality of the cloud giant, I feel like this is the weakest point of the game.

The visuals of this game, like the first, hit me like a truck. The art department is absolutely godly. Particularly the visuals of the fog are beyond the last generation of games, not your usual voxel smoke! Senua's Saga packs fog good enough to make a Blair Witch blush, if you showed me a screenshot before I played it myself I'd have assumed it was a photo. Oh and also this game pulls no punches when it comes to visceral visuals. You will see man-made horrors which would scar a young adult. Its a real gut twister when the game isn't being the prettiest scenery emulator on the platform.

My only complaint is the more limited combat mechanics compared to Senua's Sacrifice. No dodge attacks, no enemy switching, no bashes, etc. The system still functions, but it feels like they pulled out as much as they could get away with. You still have dodging, light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking, parrying, and the iconic Focus. On the topic of Focus, it is VERY under-utilised compared to Senua's Sacrifice, with no more shaded enemies outside of a tutorial section, and a particular boss fight. Other than that, its basically just there as a "Win" button and you can go through pretty much the whole game without touching it outside of the aforementioned instances. However I'd like to praise the cinematic quality of the enemy switching transitions. While you can't choose what enemy you're up against, enemies have about a dozen different "intro"/"Execution" animations whenever you finish with one enemy and are given another. But overall, the original Senua's Sacrifice combat is the one that wins my heart, still.

In short, this game is one hell of an experience which I think everyone should be lucky enough to step into. There's a lot here to enjoy, each Giant almost has its own story arc. I'm certainly going to replay this a few times before setting it down, as your reward for being a 100%-er is 3 alternatives to the traditional narrator (For completing the story, for collecting the lore posts, for collecting the fairfolk trees).

Thank you Arrowhead for turning the tide! Long live Super Earth!

Great game with a stunning art direction and brilliant effects!

What knob in a suit looked at this game and hit send??
This is my first Assassin's Creed game apart from the 3 times I played this on my friend's PS3. This doesn't just look unpolished, its bad from almost every angle you look at it. I'll start with the subjective stuff first: The combat loop is stupidly unintuitive, the environments are ugly, and the movement controls are absolutely horrible. Boss fights in this game are a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cancer.

Combat. You get 4 moves basically, not including "abilities" which I'm 6 hours in at the time of writing this and still don't know how the ♥♥♥♥ they're supposed to work. I think it wants me to hold down right or left trigger and press a button on the D pad, which is an issue because if you're not moving in this game, you're an open target. Anyways, the 4 moves are Heavy Attach, Light Attack, Block and Dodge. If you want a good example of how these can be used in a combat sequence, go play Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice because that game surprised me with it's combat, and this game did too for the opposite reasons. Even in the TUTORIAL BOSS FIGHT which is meant to teach you how to block and dodge, if you listen to the controls on screen YOU WILL DIE because the enemy's timing is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skewed. And lets just talk about that miniboss a little more because his Phase 1 is a BATTLEAXE and you can just eat those hits like is a pool noodle, but when he switches to Phase 2 he pulls out a pair of hammers and they will straight up 2 hit you from full health. The minions are just as bad. Their attacks are either way too over-telegraphed, or they're telegraphed from 15ft away and they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ teleport-dash into you to hit you with it. Idk if i'm supposed to be using stealth because it seems like every time the AI spots the curls on the top of my head they get insta aggro. Who knows, maybe after 60 hours and 120 upgrade points I'll have enough moves to make combat feel fun. Oh yea there's a stupidly large upgrade tree too, most of the abilities are filler like +2.6 hit stun, whatever the ♥♥♥♥ that mechanic is because Ubisoft won't tell me.

I know it's been a struggle to read this far so I'm not going to go into detail with everything I take issue with, just she ♥♥♥♥ that really pisses me off.
> This game performs worse on my PC than CYBERPUNK 2077 did ON LAUNCH. Constant frame jitters, crashing, LOD popping in cutscenes, etc etc. I would expect this if the game released a week ago, not from a game released 2.5 YEARS AGO. I've even upgraded my GPU since 2077's released, I played that on a 2070 on max non-RTX settings and it played pretty good. I'm running this game on a 3080Ti and my eyes are bleeding. IT DOESN'T EVEN LOOK THAT GOOD. Side by side with the Witcher 3 you'd think this was a 2012 game, it's just a step above ME:Andromeda. And to disperse any questions, I'm talking about the max settings here. I turned them down to a mix of Very High because I want to play a game, not a PowerPoint presentation.
> Graphics are horrible. Seriously, I'm saying this again because they are absolutely terrible. You can tell all of the animations in cutscenes were just pulled from some stock mocap library Ubi has on their servers, and the lip sync is on par with Netflix's Squid Game.
> There are some seriously WEIRD crosspromotional items in the shop. You can get armours from Destiny 2 if you're some massive D2 fan.
> When raiding monestaries, you are threatened with desynchronisation (reset to last checkpoint) for killing monks. Idk I just feel like if you're not gonna bite the bullet and take the hit to your ESRB rating, maybe don't make a game about viking raiders with an emphasis on raiding? I can understand this mechanic in the older games where you were in a large city, living in that city, and moonlighting as an assassin fighting a shadowy organisation. In this game, especially when actually raiding an area, its a massively immersion breaking experience. Its like if you bought a FIFA game and intercepting the ball gave you a pop-up telling you that was against the rules.
> The story is confusing and ♥♥♥♥. Have you ever watched a cinematic compilation on YouTube where its ONLY the pre-rendered cinematics and you don't get any of the context from the stuff that happens in the levels? This game is like that. There was one scene early in the game where the Player character is leaving with a bunch of other vikings to go to England, and then they're stopped by a few guards saying "Some of our men got killed on the road, they say [player] swung the axe" and its implied by the reaction of your character that you did in fact do that, but the game does not force you into a situation where this would happen and I never got into a situation like that, so there was a massive area of dissonance where the game expects you to be a murderhobo, treats you like a murderhobo, and your character doesn't even argue against it which was incredibly frustrating.


Overall, whoever greenlit this game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moron, the developers don't know how to put together a good gaming experience, the environment artists clearly try but are let down by how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ badly this game performs, the character artists are decent enough by the standards of 5 years ago, the animators should be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ashamed, and the person in charge of feeding the writing monkeys needs to be fired because obviously some of them starved in their seats and nobody bothered to finish the pages.

Oh, and ♥♥♥♥ uPlay.

Great free program for art with dubiously appropriated assets from across the gaming community

Art style? Check
Weapon balance? Check
Fun equipment? Mostly check
superfluous movement mechanics like dashing and flying? Nope
Most content available through gameplay? Nope
Microtransactions? YES
Battlepass? Better than most games since its not time limited, but still there
Level system? Nope
Stable and reliable server connection? 404
Content stream? More of a trickle, or a drip

This game could have been amazing. 343 had their chance to make their 3rd Halo game as awesome as Bungie's. The dev team took it, but the people in charge of the game got too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ greedy. If you wanna pay 2000cr ($20) for the COLOUR WHITE, and show it off nice and close when you go through an enemy while trying to melee, this is the perfect Halo game for you! 343 execs couldn't pour water out of a boot with the instructions on the heel.

With all 6 games released, I think it's fair to review this collection now! The gameplay holds up well, the story is the same, CE is best played in CLASSIC GRAPHICS because anniversary graphics SUCKS. H2A is gorgeous but multiplayer hurts my eyes on that one map with the beach (lighting too harsh). H3 is finally on PC AND IT IS GORGEOUS! Halo 4 is halo 4, the story is ok but the gameplay could be better, so all in all an authentic experience.

I hadn't had a nightmare for about 5 years before last night after playing this game. Great times had by all!

Demon harem and pancakes

This is NOT a finished game. I have issues such as the "advanced sound system" doing nothing but raping my ears. The controls are a bit clunky, and the whole sense of scale when you're standing in an open field is completely out of whack because the planet is too small and too "flat." The load times are abysmal when you're loading into your save file. The AI is ♥♥♥♥ and the fire is an ugly piss yellow and the progression is dull and linear and will get repetitive. But i like it. It's fun, its creative, it has a lovely grid system and in my opinion is an outlier against the rest of its genre of voxel-based building games, at least to this type of capacity.

I think the real charm of this game is this is a game based on physics. You build something, it needs to have a degree of structural integrity before it falls in on itself. You can build a catapult or even a trebuchet from the exact same blocks you will use to build an elevator, or a vehicle, or even just the decorations around your castle. i feel like these features give it a solid grounding in reality. You cant build too high or your tower is gonna fall, not like with minecraft, or terraria, or whatever other grid-based building game you might name where floating islands can exist and you can noob-tower up to the height limit.

If you try to build these unrealistic structures you will either fail, or you will persevere in spite of these limitations and possibly create something really quite cool looking. Though if something unrealistic *is* what you're looking for there is the option to turn off this feature, so that you may build all of the insanely tall and unsupported structures you may desire.

On top of this there is even a fairly active modding scene right here in the Steam Workshop with plenty of mods, blueprints for structures and vehicles, and even entire custom planets for you to inhabit and colonise.

But for all those pros, the cons are still there, and they cant be ignored. And seeing that this game is now out of early access, and the devs themselves have said that the development of this game is currently off the table in favour of their favourite child, Space Engineers, we probably will not be seeing any patches, or bug fixes, and certainly not DLC. Not for a while, if ever.

I want to see this game come back to life. I want the devs to finish with Space Engineers and come back to this masterpiece they left half baked. This game still has so much more to give. And honestly, seeing the price at under £8... That's the price of a KFC. You'd spend more for 2 hours at an indoor pool, or a fairground, or the movies. And for that price you could easily pass the quarantine recreating your favourite castle or just letting your imagination go wild. Buy the game, but dont expect to find yourself in a place that is a)easy to play right of the bat, b)completely stable and bug-free, c)a game that does not require you to fiddle with the options until you find what agrees with your computer, d)"feature complete." You will want to install mods after about 10 hours at most, but you're better of getting used to the base game first.