Recent reviews by Cogitator

I just can't force myself to become immersed with lacklustre world-building, nor can I force myself to enjoy such monotonous gameplay.

Listen to the audio logs, patiently wait for dialogue to finish, open a terminal somewhere and press some flavour text to open a door, shoot at some dudes.. This DLC is just the same gameplay loops found in the base game once again with different set dressing.

This review is more of a rant, a barely coherent list of my grievances without any real structure or care given. Elements thrown together haphazardly.. Hmm.

The game lacks any sense of a cohesive world, each settlement feels like it could be from a different game. That isn't to say the cities are so diverse they stand on their own, rather, each feels like a pale imitation of other works of fiction.
Environmental storytelling was a major strong point of previous BGS games but that's lacking here, it's just a small number of repeating proc-gen dungeons with the same bland data logs to read through each time. I don't get the sense that any of these locations are part of a greater world.
I've heard lots of people say the game mechanics are carbon-copies of what was in previous games (e.g., starborn powers = dragon shouts), but I think it's much worse than that - I think they're stripped-back hollow shells of what came before (e.g., one mini-game to lockpick doors and hack computers, settlement building that only allows you to use a handful of prefab structures, no weapon mods or armour crafting).
The gameplay doesn't synergise with the setting and worldbuilding feels uninspired and poorly thought out. Why do I have to go meet someone in person to talk to them? Why can't I use a phone in a sci-fi setting and save myself two or three loading screens? Why do I hack computers with a lock picking mini-game? Why are starborn temples a little-known secret when they're within walking distance of mines and farms? Why do people live in the sewers of New Atlantis when there's ample space for hundreds of miles in each direction and nobody cares if I build there? Why even build sky scrapers when there's so much space everywhere, why live in a small apartment in what's essentially a village? Why do the citizens of Akila city cower behind walls in fear of beasts that even a low-level character can easily kill? Why do alien predator species all do go down long before they come into melee range, where's the sense of danger in that?

There's some elements I enjoyed, the shipbuilding was fun and they do a great job creating a wide array of alien species. Bit weird how you can go to a planet, talk to the owner of a proc-gen bio lab and nobody mentions or even looks at the giant flying space jellyfish all around them.

The game suffers from constant flickering, it's horrendous. The shadows constantly flash and textures keep glitching. I tried mucking about with different graphic settings to no avail. I can't even play at 1080p with medium settings!

My specs:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
MSI RTX 4070
32GB RAM
Installed on NVMe SSD

Incredibly well designed courses, accurate and precise physics. What more could you want from a mini golf game?

I bought the game because I found its premise intriguing and I'm honestly blown away at how well the developers integrated gameplay into the narrative. It's fun, well-written, creative and well worth multiple playthroughs. Highly recommended.

The current peak of VR games.

I bought the game when it first released and refunded it because of performance issues and the floaty combat.
I'm glad to say they've fixed the games performance (at least for my hardware configuration) and they have massively improved the combat.

HOWEVER, the game is not worth the full retail price and the DLC is not worth your time or money. The writing is bad, really bad. The first game wasn't a masterpiece in that regard but it was fun-bad, whereas the dialog in Dying Light 2 is painful, progressively getting worse as the plot splutters to a finish. Plus, they gutted the central gimmick, the namesake of the franchise, the day and night cycle no longer feels important.

Not worth your time.

If you just want to shoot some zombies then this is the game for you.

"I'm no leader, I'm a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ parkour instructor!"