Recent reviews by Hexecutive

The good stuff: It's continuously being worked on. Cool new features are added all the time, both in and out of fairly-priced DLC. Performance has improved a lot over the years. Still has a long way to go in multiplayer. See "bad stuff" for that. However, at its most pure; the building of ships and bases, this game has a lot of value and a dearth of variety for someone wanting to just let their creativity out, either building alone or with some friends in a small private server.

Bad stuff: The netcode is junk, and the game is archaic in that it is mostly single-core. If you rent the most powerful server hardware in the world the max you will get is 30 people on a server. And each player will still be limited to building... a thimble. Needless to say, multiplayer is not this game's strength. You might think movie making had more of a future, given that Keen recently added a powerful in-game tool for directing movies. Weeeell, no. There is still only the 1 dumb character model with the backpack, and there is no way you can make an interesting movie with just that. What kind of sci-fi doesn't need characters in marine uniforms, lab suits, desert garb etc? So there is all this power in the movie tool and nothing to make with it. But I'm making movie props until the day they get some new character models I can actually use. It's annoying though, they did add some *SKINS* and seemed like they thought they were responding to just this request once in the past... Either they are really bad at English or willfully being spiteful.

Anyway. To sum up: a good small-scale game for the creative, but will quickly show you its limitations if you try to go too far beyond that.

The absolute high point of Warhammer 40,000 as a video games license.

So far it has been down hill ever since, and the trend is continuing with Dawn of War III.

But at least once in your lives you got to play Tau in a 40K game with a budget.

Cardboard cutout oversaturated Fantasy setting, threadbare lore, overly cluttered interface that uses 40% of your screen resolution's real estate, and a whale-exploiting unethical cash shop. What else is new in F2P land?
The underlying card game itself is also uninspired and derivative, to put it kindly.

Wasn't going to buy this until the day mod tools came out, but then I got the flu and took it as a sign. It's not Elder Scrolls, but I'll take it.

The hardware/ crashing issues mentioned in the forums have not affected me on an i5-3570K @4.8 Ghz, AMD R9 290x and 16GB of RAM. Game also installed on an SSD.

Hidden dialogue options being gone and the way the story kicks off way too heavy-handed and cheesy are my only complaints about this Fallout iteration, which so far is the best since Zenimax/ Bethesda took over the franchise.

Preface: I am absolutely puck-bored out of my skull of zombie games, and have been for a looooong ass time since before Dying Light came out.

But this game is different.

Being a sandbox-lite it is already halfway appealing to the explorer in me from the outset. However, having played Dead Island (for 5 minutes before uninstalling) it was with trepidation that I plunged money down on this game pretty much at launch. I could not get the bad taste out of my mouth after Dead Island for a few days on account of feeling like I was skating, no - floating, on ice and other engine-related allergies. But knowing that this game's main selling point was the parkour elements, I put these worries aside as it would be impossible to achieve that without fixing my previous woes.

Sure, the game does pander to the casual here and there. It does make me cringe somewhat that you're always being bombarded with overpowered weapons and rarely in the game feel like surviving is taking its toll at all. However, the game is so fun on account of the flow of moving from place to place that it becomes an objective unto itself to make perfect assaults and getaways rather than getting into sticky situations where outnumbered.

Also, difficulty increasing mods were some of the first to come out, and remain the most essential mods one can have today.

My biggest complaint about this game however is how early you master the movement. In Mirror's Edge, I found myself replaying the game because I wasn't satisfied with my mastery of the parkour when I completed the game. Not so for this game. In this game, it'll take less than 10 hours to reach perfection of your skills to move perfectly from place to place, and thus it becomes a bit repetitive near the end. It is simply too forgiving to be replayable.

But even my biggest complaint is minor, given that "AAA" these days have become synonymous with trash, and Dying Light came around and changed that for me. Or at least showed me a rare glimmer of hope.

The optimization problems at launch however do not paint these developers in a positive light, so while I can recommend this game now, I wouldn't recommend picking up anything fresh from this developer in the future until at least a couple of patches in.

Absolutely pales to its predecessor, warps the gameplay from deep strategy to perverted adventure/ strategy with only the basest and most repetitive of factions represented. Apart from Tyranids, which was a noble effort but came across as nothing but pandering to the loudest (and fewest) of fans.

If you want a game to reinforce the stereotype of the Warhammer 40K universe being shallow drivel that revolves around Space Morons, this is the game for you.

Throughout the years, I've put maybe 4500 hours into this game, more than any other game, over the course of three lost and rebought discs, as well as the Steam edition once I stopped putting optical drives into my computers. I still have the Cliffracer screech as my alarm in the morning. Doesn't fail to wake me up.

To me, this is the highlight of the Elder Scrolls franchise. I realize a lot of it is nostalgia - when this came out there was nothing about it that wasn't revolutionary in scope. Oh, I remember the days when my mates would outright whine for days about not being able to run the game well, after they saw what it was supposed to look like on my first proper bleeding-edge gaming PC.

Off the back of its combat system, the game got a few moderate reviews, even back in 2002. Which is understandable as this game is something as rare as a PC game that was ported to console rather than the other way around. However, as a pen & paper role playing gamer I always enjoyed the combat and never understood the problem people had with it. I was simply predisposed to suspend my disbelief before I even began.

Even today, with the graphical mods to Morrowind that are available, I have still not been able to make Oblivion look better than Morrowind. Modded DirectX 9 Morrowind just flat out looks better and more atmospheric.

The soundtrack is up there in my top 5, maybe second behind Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, just in front of the Monkey Island franchise. Jeremy Soule's best work, and such a great compliment to exploration and discovery. Apart from aforementioned Age of Conan soundtrack, I have never been more motivated to explore just because of a soundtrack. And when you hear that Cliffracer screech and the descent of timpanis, you know ♥♥♥♥ is going down.

Thank god we had spears back then. Nothing like a 1.5 reach modifier against Cliffracers.

A modder's perspective:
The game is infinitely moddable - more so than the newer TES titles. It is just more accessible and powerful. There's no need to add empty voice .mp3 to a mod just so the dialogue won't skip along on its merry way. There is no convoluted AI pathing and waypoint micromanagement just to script an NPC to move somewhere. And the scripting language in Morrowind is just downright simpler and more intuitive than most notably Skyrim.

For these reasons, Morrowind still to this day has 5-10 new mods being posted every day, and a live community. Additionally, because of how easy it is to turn idea to practice, the amount and quality of quest mods is tenfold that of especially Skyrim. If you want ACTUAL CONTENT from mods, and not just blinging out your character or anime mods, Morrowind is hands down the game you should get.

I didn't even like the game when it was free, now that it costs actual money, and a whole lot of it, it feels like a really elaborate joke.

You are alone in the ocean. The hardest thing to find is... Water?

Salt is no fun.

I've waited for this game for so long and it hasn't disappointed me in this early incarnation. Even the lack of save functionality gives it a roguelike appeal. Of course, there isn't much content yet, but another thing there isn't much of either is gamebreaking bugs.

It's likely as cheap as it'll be for months or maybe years, so why not pick it up now? You can trust Unknown Worlds to deliver.

Summer 2008. One of the hottest summers I can remember in Norway. Why? A game graphically way ahead of its time was boiling my graphics card through the side of my case on medium settings. Normally I would have just turned the settings all the way down, but the transcendent experience of these newfangled rendering techniques had me hypnotized to the point I'd rather invest in overkill airconditioning and suffer. I am sure I lost dangerous amount of weight that summer, and workmates were probably worried I was doing drugs, on account of the black lines under my eyes and the loss of weight.

But it was worth it. Despite the lack of content at launch, there was no way I could hate anything about this game. Worldbuilding, music, immersion, animation and what content was actually present; all blew away any MMORPG that came before it.

While it only took a year for Age of Conan to become the game it was supposed to be at launch, it was too late as 70% of the million plus playerbase had left, and the game became synonymous with 'failure' to the most attention deficit amongst MMO game consumers.

The PvP was never developed to the standard I had hoped, but the PvE is still among the best there is.

This is one of the greatest MMORPGs that are still alive today. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a go. If you've heard even a hum of one of the many grumpy, outdated complaints about this game, it will surprise the eyelashes right off your face.