Recent reviews by -SambaL-

A great little introduction to VR by Valve. Fun, free and a must.

Yes, the extra step of having to create and log in to a PSN account is annoying, especially seeing this is a single player game. But I am not going to downvote the game itself for that. Besides, it is just a minor annoyance to me.

What the game itself is concerned, it is better than ever, and in my opinion well worth the asking price for upgrading the complete edition to the remastered edition. Saying it is just a visual update is not doing it justice. Basically the whole game has been overhauled, and it not only looks stunning compaired to the already great looking original, it also plays and feels a lot better, with a bunch of quality of life improvements.

I'm sorry, I really want to like this game but when I demolish a structural part of a building I expect physics and gravity to do the rest, not have the structure be held in place by 3 remaining bricks. Anyone who has played Red Faction Guerrilla and loved the wrecking mechanics will understand why I am dissapointed with Teardown's physics based system or lack there of.

Also, not a big fan of the whole steal this, this and optionally that within 60 seconds or you fail. Fine if it's the occasional mission objective but not the whole game. It takes away from what I initially thought the game was going to be about, wrecking stuff and being good at it.

I will end on a positive note though. The game looks really good for a vexel type game. If you have a beefy enough system destructing things in grand fashion will look amazing.

Simply put; Death Stranding is what you get when someone gamifies the saying "It's not the Destination, but the Journey that Matters." In this case that someone being Hideo Kojima so be prepaired to deal with a ton of weirdness next to amazing and innovative gameplay.

This game has been in my Steam library untouched since I bought it roughly 4-5 years ago. I never got around to it, mainly due to having a huge backlog of games. But a few days ago I was really in the mood for a narrative driven single player experience full of adventure and discovery and then I came across the Tomb Raider franchise while it was on sale this past week and I thought to myself " Don't I have the first one somewhere?" . And Yes I did, so I installed it (Only 11 Gigs!!?) , started playing yesterday and I was not disappointed. To be honest, there was this initial doubt if I would still enjoy this first installment in the rebooted series because of its age. After all, the game can be considered an old game by today's standards in terms of graphics and gameplay mechanics,. But those doubts quickly disappeared after the first hour of playing. Sure, the Quick Time Events feel linear and dated but otherwise this game does not disappoint in the story driven adventure department. It really feels like you're trying to survive through the game. The by now well known survival gameplay mechanics (scavenging, hunting, upgrading, etc.) still hold up and work very well in the overall narrative of the game. It's pretty basic but for a action adventure game like this it's enough to make it feel well-rounded and fleshed out.

All in all I'm glad I pushed myself to finally start to explore this "new" Tomb Raider franchise and experience the birth of Lara Croft and I recommend you do the same if it has been unplayed in your library as well.

Here is why I cannot recommend Arkham Origins in a nutshell.
If you're interested in playing this third instalment in the franchise it's likely you've played Arkham Asylum and Arkham City already. Coming in to this one the "been there done feeling" will quickly come over you, even if there have been a few years in between playing the last instalment and this one.
And if you haven't played the first two games in the series and Arkham Origins seems the most logical one to start with; don't, because that repetitive feeling might creep up on you if and when you get to Arkham City and you'll probably stop playing the arguably best one out of the bunch.

Basically Batman: Mordor Knight with a cool Nemesis system.

Probably not a popular opinion but I didn't like it all that much. It can be funny and it is quircky and the artstyle is fine too but the game itself is just way too easy. It wasn't until the last level that the puzzle element in this game started to get interesting, but like I said, that was the last level and after that the game was over. I feel that they tried to be like the Katamari Damashi games but left any challenge out. Which is fine, but I got bored with it really quickly. Because of that it won't get my recommandation.

Though the game itself is awesome I simply cannot recommend it to anyone at this point in time. It is just too unstable and frankly I am disappointed in Guerrilla Games for releasing the game in such a state. I am aware that a part of the QA process is being done by the end-user nowadays but with Horizon Zero Dawn it's almost like we're doing all the testing. Perhaps Guerrilla Games had no idea what they were getting in to on their first outing to the PC with there being so many different PC configurations out there, so i'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope they'll patch things up fairly soon. Until then I'll be getting a refund and playing something else instead.

As for my own experience:
I run a Intel Core I5 6600K @ 4.2Ghz, 16 Gigs of ram and a GTX1060 (6G) @ a ultra-wide resolution of 2560x1080, and even though the game was playable for me without any micro-stutters my average frame rate was around 45fps with frequent drops in to the 30's and an occasional run in to the lower 50's. Somewhat playable as far as frame rate is concerned but a far cry from how it could and should run on medium settings. What made it even less enjoyable were the occasional slow loading and sometimes glitchy textures and sudden crashes to the desktop.

Also, kids in games are still creepy, especially when their faces run at a lower frame rate.