Recent reviews by Reyos

I like games like this, Myst was one of my favourite games of that era. This game had some potential but doesn't live up to it.

First the graphics. resolution tops out at something much too low for a game released in late 2022, this isn't the end of the world, but it's just one of the smallest of many issues in this game. There are issues with how it renders for me, lines through everything diagonally across my screen that don't exist in any other game. Some of the graphical issues made it harder to play, anything written in game was hard to read, and for a few puzzles (notably the morse code translation) you needed to read in game writing.

Control issues. My biggest gripe was the mine cart section, every other part of the game when you have to push a lever, you use the mouse, click and drag the lever, but here it uses the movement controls. I spent ten minutes trying to figure it out, seeing if I had missed some way to unlock the cart before I tried just pressing move while in it. This isn't the same system for moving the mag-lev, there you grab the lever with the mouse and push it forward, but..,

Game breaking bug. The game broke right after the mag-lev section, when it was moving, the game had me looking down, when I got out of the chair, the game kept spinning, I saved and reloaded to try and fix this, and it loaded me off the map in the water where you're not supposed to be able to go.

And all of this took far too little time. I'm an hour and a half in and the lighthouse seems like the end game (2 achievements left to earn) If the game hadn't bugged out I would probably finish before the 2 hour mark, particularly because a lot of that hour and a half was idle time while the game was just allowed to sit (one of the reasons I like games like this, outside of active puzzle solving you can just safely sit there and do things when you are free to do them) The puzzles were easy for a game like this, too few and far between mostly,

I'm giving up on this game for the second time, probably for good. Bad resolution, bad controls, and bad bugs. And it's a shame, the look, feel and lore of the game showed promise, reminded me of The Witness, the last game like this I played, in a lot of ways, and was better in lore I think, but in all the other ways it far paled in that comparison

A while back this simple puzzle game got some sweeping changes, and most of them cause problems. The UI was simple before, now it's cluttered and not intuitive. There's a gear button on the puzzle screen, it does nothing, the position of the puzzle is a little off, it's cut off on the top of the screen and the pieces noticeably shift upwards when put into place, it took me a while to find where the preview was, since it wasn't on screen anymore I had to click a few times, once I figured out the mascot at the bottom right was actually the interface for puzzle actions, to open it.

I still play this because I have it, I try to do the challenge puzzles, but I open it maybe once a month, and wouldn't have touched it if I were coming to it knowing how it is now.

This is Magic: the Gathering on the computer, free to play and possible to play without spending any money, that sounds great, but...

Magic as a game has been going downhill since M20, the power creep has exploded, which is both good and bad for this game, bad in that it makes it hard for new players to learn the game without getting frustrated, but good in that new players don't need to pay as high an entry cost when many of the best cards available are coming out currently. The existence of Arena has lead to some of this downhill slide even on paper magic, the easiest example I can think of is the fetches from SNC, which automatically sacrifice when played - this is counter to the usual wisdom in magic of waiting until you know what you need, and waiting so you don't give your opponent more information, but was done because it speeds up the digital game.

That brings me to some of the worst issues with how Arena is implemented. It waits to ask you if you want to take an action every single time you can, which gets pretty annoying when you have instant speed effects like Skirk Prospector. They haven't given a way to tell the game "no, I don't want you to wait for me to confirm I don't want to take this action every single time I can"

There are no good shortcuts for the game either, no way to tell the game when you left a card on top in the middle of 30 scry 1 triggers, that it shouldn't keep asking you if you want it to leave it on top (I've had this in the 100s, it's not pretty) shortcuts that are obvious in paper and would be easy to code in, and even obvious if you are leaving a card on top that you want it to stay there (in this case)

The game also punishes you for it's own limitations. I have lost games because the game took so long running through actions that would have taken 5 seconds in paper because it needed to ask half a dozen questions and get the same answer every time for each step of the process.

The game has also started offering "Alchemy" cards, and rebalanced versions of real cards, but it also offers you very little choice in if you want to play with, and agaisnt, these cards or not. Priest of Possibilities and Oracle of the Alpha are cards that shouldn't exist, but if you want to play anything other than standard, you are forced to play against these decks that use digital only cards and mechanics. As for the rebalanced cards, the worst example is Symmetry Sage, a piece of what was already one of the most common and oppresive decks in standard that was made stronger, even more oppressive and even more broken.

I love Magic the Gathering I have played it for over a dozen years, but there are problems with it, they are getting worse, and they are much, much worse here. They could fix some of them, but they don't seem to want to put in the effort. I don't recommend people join in now, not until some of these fixes are put into place.

Game feels like it could be pretty good, if it didn't CtD over and over and over... This wouldn't be as big of an issue if the game saved itself more often, but since all saves are manual and only at specific points, a lot of progress can end up lost if it crashes at a bad time.

The controller control scheme is annoying, using the left stick for throttle and rolls is terrible, I found myself rolling because I didn't push the stick exactly how they wanted. And games really need to stop making chase missions that fail immediately based on distance. I could see my target, I could still easily catch my target, but because they hit that magical 5k mark in distance "looks like they got away"

I'm going to avoid the political controversy of the game, this review is about the game not the subject, particularly in the current political climate. This also isn't the first time there's been a the "bad guys" win alternate universe, Wolfenstein did it with the Nazis, Fallout sort of does it with the Chinese (or more accurately no one won there).

The game is a mess. The ideas are decent, but the execution is problematic. Functionally I have had it CTD on average every 6 5 or so hours of play time (4 times in 23 5 times in 26 hours), and with no way to save outside of specifically designated save spots, this has made me replay the same section a few times. The loot collecting animation is fun at first, but it's terribly glitched, I've had objects just hang in mid air because the looting animation didn't actually give those particular objects gravity after you sucked in everything else of actual value. Even with the 'polymer' meant to defy gravity the graphical glitch was a bit jarring.

Rather than progress with the main story, I decided to hunt upgrades to my gear (A choice I made after getting my a** handed to me my first time trying to fight Hedgie) This meant me exploring some areas sooner than I otherwise would and the difficulty spikes were an issue, but the real issue is the sheer number of seemingly infinitely spawning repair bots in the open world, repairing everything you kill it, sometimes as fast as you can kill them. The repair bots only don't seem to repair themselves, but they don't need to, another swarm of 3 or 4 will be launched if you kill off the last one every single time. This sidequesting hunt brought up two other issues in the game though, first is some of the puzzle rooms were not thought out well. In some cases I think I skipped the intended solution and found shortcuts, in others those shortcuts I did find made it impossible to continue, I had found my way to an area I shouldn't have been able to reach by jumping and dashing around an obstacle. The second issue is that at one point the game messed up where I was in the main quest. I was getting calls from Petrov, a man who was supposed to be dead, and the player character just had an attitude with him and accepted it. This wasn't the only dialogue issue, a few times the PC and CHarles have commented on noticing some item, that they shouldn't even know they were looking for, because like a lot of players I live by the creed the right way is the last path you take when in 'dungeons' and I hadn't seen why I needed for example a Tereshkova's arm,.

The puzzle and platforming designs are pretty good, I've heard some complaints about some puzzles, but there are more than enough hints on those if you pay attention. I am not sure but I believe the magnetic poles are backwards sometimes, - attracting - instead of +. The player character is a bit off, swinging between unflinching, almost fanatic, loyalty that I and Charles both think is misplaced and a bad attitude at the drop of an ushanka.

The worldbuilding is great, I like it probably better than Bioshock Infinite, though it could use more travel between flying parts of the complex. Mostly I am enjoying the game, but there's some pretty glaring holes that need to be fixed, both in the programming and in the writing, which is why I don't recommend this game until they fix those issues. I am writing this after yet another CTD is probably going to force me to replay the last 20+ minutes of the game, so take that as you will.

The game is actually worse than the previous one, the challenge and arcade options are dumbed down and slimmer, no visible difference in game play, just where they show you the cabinet, which I am betting I am not the only one who doesn't actually care. The added selection would be great, if half the games weren't just ported over from the previous game (which had the same half the games ported over from the previous game) except this time they don't give you the tables you already own, they don't even seem to offer you any kind of discount on rebuying what you already have, probably because they are trying to push the service model, which is one of the worst things to happen to gaming...

Artificial difficulty is a bad thing. When you finally get the third part of the dagger The game tells you to head back to the spawn zone, and it starts killing you, a health drain so fast I had to use 4 heals within about half as many minutes, they also closed off the paths back out of the volcano, the one I did third on the run making me search for the one route that I assume was still open while my health was quickly draining. It probably would be easier if I had done them in a different order, it probably would be easier after more runs when I upgraded health and healing more, but it shouldn't soft lock you out so hard if you can get that far on an earlier run.

I played the original version of the game 34 hours and was probably most of the way through and just played about 2 hours of this version total.

I played the original on my laptop from 2017. That laptop had a GTX 1060 with 3gb vram, 32 gb of 2400mhz DDR4 ram, a 2.8Ghz I7 and a hard disk drive.

I just built myself a computer a week ago. My new desktop has a 3070 TI with 8gb of vram, 64gb of 3200mhz DDR4 ram, a 3.8ghz Ryzen 7 580X and WD Black M.2 SSDs. Every single thing in this system is several steps up from the aging laptop.

This new edition with performance "enhancements" runs far, FAR worse on my new, better computer than the original ran on that laptop when it came out.

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For those who say I don't meet recommended specs, I do. The two Nvidia cards they recommend are the GeForce RTX 2070 and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. My card is better or equal to the recommended RTX 2070 in every way and actually marginally better than the GTX 1080, even though the 1080 has more ram, it's GDDR5X and less performant than the GDDR6 in my RTX 3070 Ti, coupled with the lower clock speed on the GP102 processor in the 1080 compared to the GA104 in the RTX 3070 Ti, 2560 fewer cores, about 80% of the bandwidth, the RTX 3070 Ti is the overall stronger card. Which is probably why the GTX 1080 Ti is really only recommended for 1080p while the 3070 is still considered a decent card for 4k graphics.

It's better than 5 was in my opinion. Far Cry 5's hypnosis mechanic to advance the plot was one of the worst things I have ever seen in gaming however so it's a pretty low bar to clear.

The game doesn't seem to want to let you play stealth, like previous games in the series there are alarms that are meant to call in reinforcements, but even when you clear every enemy without tripping one, new enemies will just arrive/spawn in the base you're clearing, including one time where I was clearing a ship off the coast, did it silently without even being seen, no enemies left until suddenly... there were another half dozen of them on the boat.

The default controls are pretty terrible, for example other games, even other ubisoft games (Assassin's Creed), that have a vision and tagging system tend to have that system bound to the V key by default. What's V in this game? Why it's the key to instantly fire a volley from the PC's back mounted rocket launcher/mortar, instantly alerting every enemy for miles while I was trying to stealth my way through. Even when you want to use that weapon, you can't decide where to aim, trying to use it to take down an anti-air gun the rockets all tracked to soldiers, who shouldn't even be there since I spent the last ten minutes clearing the base with my sniper rifle.

The "amigos" are a cute animal companion thing, but it's far too easy to dismiss them and no way to undo it immediately as the animal runs off, because again the controls aren't very intuitive. Even when you have them they don't always work as they should, getting the dog to actually fetch items from downed enemies is like pulling teeth... from the gator.

The vehicle system is annoying, you can get any number of vehicles of different types, but only 4 of them can be customised, and you need to scan vehicles you find to get customisation options, except if you already have scanned one of that base vehicle then you can't scan it again and you have to drag it back to a base to get that vehicle's paint and interior color options.

You can shoot the drivers of land vehicles through the windows, but even with a sniper rifle with armor piercing rounds, you can't shoot through the glass protecting the pilot of a helicopter to take them out and make it crash (or even when the chopper has landed)

Edit to add:

Subtitles are done horribly. There's two settings, subtitles and sound subtitles, neither of them turn on subtitles for probably half the voice lines in the game, where you're not directly talking to an NPC but the NPC is talking. Does Ubisoft think the hard of hearing don't deserve to know what the npcs are talking about? Even the subtitles that are there are done badly, they aren't always in the right order, so the first half of what someone says shows up, the response shows up on screen, then the second half of that first person's line shows up.

They still kind of have that kidnap/capture the player character multiple times in this game. It's a horrible trope that Far Cry does far too often. Once is forgivable, but once the PC survives and escapes the first time, it's stupid to take them alive the second, and third, time.