Recent reviews by BCSWowbagger

This DLC adds some solid spice to the main game. I'm (still) not much of a strategy gamer, and rarely play through the games. BSG:Deadlock held my attention enough to convince me to replay the entire game so I could enjoy this DLC -- and I even did it on Fleet Admiral. However, I agree with others that it is well worth buying this DLC before playing the main game the first time.

The story in Broken Alliance is no less ludicrous than the rest of this game's story, but we're not here for that. We're here for the gameplay! And the Broken Alliance mission design adds some much-appreciated variety and pacing to the main campaign. Fresh side missions are an added bonus (although they are often too unpredictable to risk any fleets on, at least at higher difficulties). Really erased some of the monotonous moments in the main campaign.

Very fun! Thanks for making this.

SteamVR is a steaming pile of crap. It adds an additional application layer between your headset and the games you want to play for no very obvious reason. That's a bit like regular desktop Steam, but this thing takes substantially longer to load. When it works, it works... fine. When it doesn't work, which is shockingly often, you're looking at a reboot of your headset or of SteamVR or, most often, both. It's an application that, somehow, routinely fails to notify the headset that it has been quit -- something no other application struggles with, including even some SteamVR games.

That might all be manageable, if you ended up able to run your VR games pretty well. But SteamVR has no *idea* how to run your VR games, and instead loads you up with frame stuttering (and thus motion sickness) on games that your hardware is more than capable of whipping. Not just on Half-Life Alyx, but even on the lower-weight No Man's Sky, I ultimately had to go in and tweak the Nvidia Control Panel settings for those specific games, because both games were unplayable at any graphic setting (I have no issue with any non-SteamVR games), and SteamVR's built-in motion smoothing made everything even worse. Once I made my tweaks, both games were smooth as butter, even HL:A on Ultra with standard resolution -- but I never should have had to do that, because SteamVR is supposed to know how to run its own flagship game optimally on a popular headset. (I have a Quest 2.)

So, yeah, SteamVR is garbage. On the plus side, we have absolutely no choice but to use SteamVR, so giving it a negative review is pointless and reading this negative review is also pointless. Embrace your destiny. VR is amazing. HL:A is even amazing! I'm glad I own a headset. But SteamVR is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst part of VR.

*If you're experiencing similar stuttering issues, the fixes that worked for me in the Nvidia control panel for the specific affected games were:

Power Management Mode: Prefer max performance
Texture filtering - ansiotropic sample optimization: on
Texture filtering - Quality: Performance
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: On
Vertical sync: fast

Then you have to DISABLE Motion smoothing and (if you have it on for some reason) legacy reprojection mode in the game itself, because SteamVR will override these GPU settings if you have those options on. You may also need to give OVRServer_x64.exe a higher priority in the Process Manager -- I run it at Realtime right now -- but that wasn't the thing that instantly fixed it for me.

CONTROL notices one of the key differences between movies and video games, and it exploits that difference to tremendous effect.

Movies are essentially about characters. You get to know them, you see them make choices, you see what the consequences are. Despite many, many attempts, video games don't do this very well, because the protagonist is under player control, and accounting for all possible player choices is very difficult. While some games, like Disco Elysium, CAN make player choice seem meaningful, it's a daunting task that demands the entire game and all its mechanics be shaped around it.

Video games aren't essentially about characters. Video games are essentially about *settings.* In a movie, the hero storms through an office with a shotgun and blows everyone away before moving on to the Big Bad. The hero never stops to sit down at every employee's computer to read their emails. In a movie, you might get one good shot of a glittering alien city as the ship comes in for a landing, but a video game has to make that city come to life. Video games struggle with character arcs because of player freedom -- but that same freedom makes it very easy for players to explore a space and learn everything about it.

CONTROL leans hard into that. The Federal Bureau of Control is just an amazingly realized place. The entire game takes place inside one building, The Oldest House, occupied by one agency, the FBC, and those two together are the game's real central "character." This is a world where the crazy conspiracy theories are all real, where the Men In Black really do show up to stop trans-dimensional incursions and then tell the press it was just a weather balloon, where magic objects beyond human understanding threaten the world every day and Earth's only defense is a few thousand fragile, stupid humans messing with forces they can't begin to fathom.

I played the game so I could walk through this building and see first-hand how they managed to hold back the darkness -- and to learn what exactly was out there in the darkness. I wanted to know what exactly had happened in the Ordinary Altered World Event and how Jesse Faden could do what she could do. I wanted to learn what was in The Fridge and what kinds of correspondence showed up in Dead Letters. Eventually, I did!

...more or less. (As a paranormal game, it naturally leaves quite a few questions unanswered, or only hinted at.)

The combat usually passed the time. In its best moments, it got my blood pumping as I did a nifty psychic ballet to stay alive. At worst, it became tedious -- especially toward the end of the game, since enemies continually respawn in rooms I've already cleared, in longer and longer waves. But I'm not really an FPS guy, and I'm getting less patient as I age and have less time to game. Once I figured out that I could kill most enemies with a maxed-out Throw power, I pretty much stuck to that for the rest of the game. There were times when I would have preferred to just turn off enemies (or make combat easier), but some completist part of me insisted I beat it on default difficulty. Meh.

(Although, I gotta admit, the Ashtray Maze was RAD.)

Regardless of the combat, there are few setting in video games as memorable as the world of the Federal Bureau of Control. It stands out for me with the galaxy of Mass Effect and the dystopian future of Deus Ex (two other games that lean hard but effectively into the player's instinct to go exploring). CONTROL was worth it for that alone.

I don't even know how to describe this game. If I say "it's very talky," people think, "oh no I have to read a lot of lore." But, really, the game doesn't even give you that much about the world -- not compared to something like Skyrim or even Mass Effect. The talkiness is unlike anything you've ever experienced in another game... not least because this is a game that will quite happily punish you for doing the traditional RPG "click all dialogue options in numeric order" thing.

It's an RPG that will occasionally give you information, after visibly passing a skill check, before later informing you that actually the skill check was harder than it claimed and it was actually lying to you the whole time. It's a game where you can start wearing a pair of shiny shoes and suddenly the shoes are having an (absurd) argument with your tie about how great free markets are. (All political arguments in Disco Elysium -- and there are a lot of them -- are fundamentally ridiculous, and the game knows it, which is wonderful.)

It's an RPG that gives you a Thought Cabinet, which you can fill up with Thoughts. Each thought must be unlocked and then researched ("internalized"), incurring a cost and a penalty during internalization, in exchange for bonuses at the end. But, just like in real life, you don't know in advance what the bonuses are going to be! You just have to decide what you want your detective to be thinking about. And he has a LOT to think about. Is he going to try and remember The Litany Of Contact Mike, God rest his soul, or is he going to focus really hard on understanding the ♥♥♥♥*-Sexual Underground in order to impress a certain boy? Or maybe, just possibly, you need to take some time to remember your birthday, since your mind was completely blasted apart just before the game started.

It's an RPG where you should take some time one night to read a book about cockatoos so the game can help you decide your cop-o-type, the kind of cop you are. It's an RPG where failing a skill check can lead to a better result than a successful one (but not usually!).

It's an RPG where there's a board game on a shelf in a store that one player in three MIGHT buy if there's enough extra cash on hand, which you can only then play if you pass a skill check. And then there's a complicated decision tree for this entirely fictional board game you are playing, allowing you to win or lose, as the case may be. The net effect of all this on the game's final result: nil. The net effect on your enjoyment of the game along the way: substantial.

I don't know. If you don't want to play this from what I just told you, I don't really understand you and this probably isn't a review for you.

Lots of games have tried to turn you into a detective, but it's always turned out to be really, REALLY hard to get it right. The Sherlock Holmes games and L.A. Noire both tried their best, but ultimately they had to fall back on the same basic mechanics: you are detective! You are looking around! Oh look, a CLUE! Put it in your NOTEBOOK! It may come up in CONVERSATION later! Conversation may yield more CLUEs or allow you to make an ACCUSATION! No you may NOT leave this area, you little snot, because you haven't collected enough CLUES yet! Get back here! Without the basic mechanic of "FIND CLUE / USE CLUE / ACCUSE," which has been part of "mystery" games since Scooby-Doo on the Sega Genesis (and probably before), the games have no idea how to track your progression and advance the story -- no way to prevent you from solving cases just by guessing until the computer says you got the right answer. The job of really good mystery games for decades has been, basically, to come up with clever ways of giving the player an illusion of actually solving mysteries.

Lucas Pope's ingenious design for Return of the Obra Dinn gets around all that. Clues are whatever you decide they are. Pope has drawn plenty of them into his pictures, but they aren't signposted or logged or anything. You collect the clues you need and solve each mystery on your own time, with a really clever "must solve three deaths at a time, with three pieces of information each" mechanic preventing you from just guessing through every combination. (Or at least discouraging it.)

For the first time, I really felt like a detective solving a mystery. Highly recommended.

(The story itself was meh, but solving everything that had happened was very satisfying.)

There are walking simulators in the world that work. They tell stories that, for one reason or another, could not exist other than as a game, and embrace their medium successfully. The Beginner's Guide is one.

Dear Esther is not. If judged as a game, it isn't a good game; there's no gameplay. If judged as a film (which is really what Dear Esther most closely resembles), it isn't a good film; there's just some vistas and some nonsense revealed too slowly and without enough explanation.

It was something novel at the time, and I guess that's fair enough. I can never take that achievement away from the developer, nor do I want to. My friend and I had a very trippy time playing through it over an afternoon long ago. But I can't recommend it.

There is a LOT wrong with this game, and Yahtzee Croshaw is right about most of it.

BUT. BUT.

The dialogue and choice system involved so many spurs and hooks and loops that I felt in control of my story in a way I've never felt before, even in a game like Mass Effect. (Although ME is a better game overall.) For me, obsessed with the idea of immersion and choice in games, this made the whole experience worthwhile. I haven't played it since I finished it years ago, but I remember my time fondly, and I've always wanted to see its choice mechanics implemented into more polished games.

Some people think this game is about murder. This is an understandable mistake.

This is a game about exploration. You don't just sneak in and kill someone. Okay, you CAN just sneak in and kill someone, but it's both much harder and less fun so what are you even doing?

No, no, this is a game about learning everything there is to know about a certain person. About understanding all his goals, his fears, his secrets, his favorite hiding places. About studying the complicated social tapestry of his whole environment -- his staff, his guests, even the townspeople. (They have goals and fears and secrets, too!) About finding just the right way to insinuate yourself into his world in a way that doesn't raise an ounce of suspicion... so that you can learn even more.

And then, at the end, when you've learned all there is to know... THEN you kill him.

Then you come back and try it all again from a different angle. The game is loaded with "opportunities" and "challenges." These aren't just the usual, "do the same thing but harder!" that you get in too many video games. They're prompts to go exploring and uncover things you never would have found on your own. Sure, you've killed Claus Strandberg and and Reza Zaydan, but have you killed them both, at the same time, with a .50 Anti-Personnel Cannon? The amount of discovery required to figure out HOW to do that is why this game is great.

I'm not a big fan of unlicensed private murder, even when the targets are the truly heinous people this game marks for death. (And, yes, it does help that these missions all target truly evil criminals.)

But you know what I AM a huge fan of? Deus Ex. With the immersive sim genre all but dead, the is the closest thing we have in 2020. I'll take it.

The tactical and strategic layers are both simple enough for a dummy like me to understand them, but both are still filled with interesting choices (especially at the strategic layer, where doing ANYTHING quickly costs tylium and your reserves are extremely finite) and lots of skill (especially at the tactical layer, where tracking all the different missile launches and armor plating levels is often the difference between total victory and pyrrhic victory... or outright defeat).

I'm not much of a tactics player, but I'm enjoying this more than any tactical game since XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I will probably go ahead and buy all the DLC at some point in the next six months. (I currently have only the base game, and I've heard the DLC enhances the overall experience greatly.)

EDIT: Five years later, I am still asking for a DLC every year for my birthday (until the collection is complete). Then, every year, I play through that DLC voraciously. I've pretty much solved the game, playing now at Fleet Admiral difficulty with veterancy and damage turned on (tbh, it isn't even Galactica if you don't turn on persistent damage), and yet I can't get enough of the core gameplay loop. Always one more turn!

I have nothing really new to say about this game. Many people have put many hours into explaining what made this game such a shock. All I can add is that it made me think, it made me question whether I am a good person, it was an interesting story, and the core gameplay is enjoyable (which is one of the things the story objects to!). I recommend.