Recent reviews by Reyos

It does what it says it does, it's great at benchmarking hardware, even lets you (or them) keep track of scores and compare to big data sets about systems to know where yours is and where it's lacking.

So why do I not recommend the software? The company's business model. If you buy it now, (particularly since it's on sale for CDN$11.24) you get everything, every single upgrade is included for the price. I got it on sale too, the December sale back in 2014 for CDN$5.59. I bought the Time Spy upgrade on sale too, in the December sale of 2017 for CDN$1.64. In total I paid CDN$7.23, but I don't own the Storage Benchmark (CDN$3.39), the Port Royal upgrade (CDN$3.39) or the Speed Way upgrade (CDN$5.69). In total the upgrades I don't have would cost CDN$12.47 to buy separetely now, more than the current sale price of the software including all three of them and the Time Spy upgrade I already own. Since I already own PCMark and VRMark I could even buy the whole package bundle for CDN$7.87 and just get these upgrades in the current sale at nearly half the price, just like I could if I didn't own any parts of 3dMark but had the other two.

I'm okay with paid DLC, even in non-game software, I'm not okay with them punishing existing owners by charging so much for that DLC but throwing it in for free for new buyers.

This is a great classic action RPG style game. The story is great, but it has a ton of side jokes (like the blue hedgehag boss that drops a gold ring and chilli dogs, or the bag of holding complaining about not being needed in game) The skill trees and mechanics of gameplay are great, though with multiple buttons to do the same thing, the tutorial is poorly written to give instructions on the harder way to do things (needing two right thumbs to press the right stick and hit one of the buttons, rather than instructing you to use the shoulder triggers that work the same way)

There's a fatal flaw in "you can recruit and play as anyone" kind of gameplay - when you make all the characters so interchangeable you need bad writing. Half of the time the PC responses in conversations barely make any sense, because they are just sound bytes used interchangeably with a dozen others, it breaks any kind of immersion the game builds through the story.

The controls are a pain too, which hack 'q' does seems dependant on some esoteric unknown factor, though usually it ends up being disable every time I want it to be remote control. Esc also changes from opening the game menu to exiting remote control, annoying when you are used to hitting it to pause games, doubly so since there is no easy way to reconnect to your deployed drone or bot already half way through wherever you were sending it.

The story would and could have been good, but their shift from a single player character to everyone's a player character hurts it so much, don't get it unless you can get a great sale.

Update:

I finished the main campaign and started playing the bloodlines expansion, and the problems get worse not better. The one twist in the campaign was good, though they kept jumping around with Cass's motivations in a terrible writing sort of way.

As for the expansion, it dials up a lot of the problems. Actually playing as a single character fixes the writing problems that came from the ability to have any conversation as any character, but the addition of robot enemies that can apparently see and shoot through walls completely ruins the "play your way" aspect of the game, just lost a mission twice because I sent in my drone, had it start a hacking sequence then hid it out of view but in hacking range, the new robot found me outside the restricted area, through 2 brick walls and started shooting, alerting all the other enemies to where I was hiding. I prefer to play games like this using stealth, this expansion completely ruined that. The changes to basic spiderbot functions between the two games (not counting upgrades) also forces you into a different playstyle, this expansion wants you to do things guns blazing.

The worst HoP I've played in a long time. No map, so moving between areas takes time. During the HoPs the found item animation takes a few seconds and can't be skipped or interrupted, meaning you need to wait for it to finish before you click the next item (and not realising this may make you think you found something wrong). The first HoP doesn't list items, just tells you to find "logical pairs" of items, meaning you have to not only figure out which things on screen can be clicked, you also have to figure out the specific logical connections the game wants, and there are many ways to logically connect pairs of the items. In another early puzzle you have to figure out they want you to use scissors to cut out a butterfly that's completely visible before 'finding' it. In a third puzzle you need to find a "blade" but the knife isn't what they want or the sword, it's the straightrazor. This is on top of the standard localisation and the regular multiple valid answers that HoPs have...

This one has a lot of the issues you see in HOPs, particularly those that were translated. Some items have very regional names, other times there are hidden object items that match multiple things (specific lightbulb on a string of lightbulbs). The script for the story has errors, there are many items that would work but you aren't allowed to use (can't use the pickaxe to hook an item out of reach under a log, have to get a different hook item and come back)

The story is great, the setting, the mechanics, everything about the game is wonderful and I'm eagerly waiting for a third game in the IP to come out, while playing the first two again for the 3rd (or possibly 4th or more) time.

Compared to the first almost everything is an improvement, though I preferred the old energy system (bar with variable costs to use things, not discrete batteries where everything cost one like in this sequel)

The story is great, the setting, the mechanics, everything about the game is wonderful and I'm eagerly waiting for a third game in the IP to come out, while playing the first two again for the 3rd (or possibly 4th or more) time.

Stumfol's "Prisoner" does get annoying after a while though, since it plays infinitely on repeat in the ops areas (respawn and upgrades). I suppose it's giving me an idea of how retail workers feel hearing Mariah Carey over and over every Christmas.

The game is okay, combat is worse than it was in the first game (cant interrupt or change direction of attacks mid combo, no tracking/locking on enemies) the factions are narrower (clerics and outlaws are kind of sub-factions not actual factions anymore, lost several fleshed out factions and gained only one) and of course my biggest issue with the game, they released a DX12 patch that instead of being a patch just doubled the size of the game by installing two copies, it's not worth the hard drive space.

A game all about music and sound waves where the audio is broken just isn't worth playing.

I'm muddling through but the game is broken. The game stutters and freezes during play, most commonly during combat and cutscenes. Sometimes it picks back up right where it left off, sometimes it continues audio and the video jumps to catch up. I can't seem to find anything useful about the issue, just other complaints that are either gone or just never addressed.

Update: I've now hit an impassible progress wall, a bug that causes a CtD every time I get to a certain point in game. Really not an acceptable issue from such big names a year after the game has come out, avoid this game.