Recent reviews by The Ultimate Potato

The game itself is good, but not that good. For instance, a lot of mechanics have been dumbed down when compared to GTA 4.

Crux of the matter is that modders were told to cease and desist by a legal team... am I reading this correctly?

I remember playing MTASA, SAMP, GTA Rumble etc. more than the standalone games themselves. Have they gone mad? The multiplayer in GTA 5 is well made, but it still falls flat when compared to MTASA w/ map editor from 11 years ago. Despite the amount of pleasant trivialities and customisation, it manages to be less fun, on top of denying the next generation both the entertainment and educational value of modding.

The game has very little to offer in its' current state, but the devs got one thing right for sure: it appears as a technically solid foundation upon which to expand. Also the art style is pretty.

Could be something great in the future. Not now.

Calling this an exceptional title is bound to spark controversy, but then what else can you call it? I can't help but draw a parallel to Howard Hughes' obsessive refinement of his movies, since Undertale, too, was essentially designed by one man with complete and total control over all aspects, and who also chose to obsessively work on his so called "art". Both authors also happened to have a money parachute, allowing them to do nothing but work on their creation for months on end, and what we ended up with is as close to their vision as you can get.

You really can't say much about this game without spoiling anything, and the less you know about it, the more you are likely to enoy it. Despite having seen a ton of spoilers I was still surprised countless times. It's best that you watch the trailer and decide whether or not you're interested based on that alone.

As for all the hatred surrounding Undertale, I believe that is actually directed towards the fanbase, not the game itself. You'll understand once you've both finished the game, and interacted with the community.

To the chagrin of all the haters, I got exactly what I was expecting, and was a lot more pleased with it than with Arkham Origins. The AAA budget for a familiar brand, supported by great voice actors and audiovisuals is all you could ever want (or expect) from a good movie-licensed title.

I'm reluctant to call it the best in the series, since it's more of the same, but you can't deny that each installment is going to be more refined than the last one. Definitely recommended for fans of the series, but be sure to play the older Arkham games first.

I'm sure it wasn't worth the price at release, not to mention all the technical issues, but neither of these issues apply anymore. If you're excited for more of the same, and slightly better, then this is exactly what you'll get.

I'm sure a narrow audience will enjoy this, but by that I mean fans of old Hitman games who are also willing to pay an unjustified amount of money. The levels are very well made, there is a ton of freedom and multiple ways to eliminate your targets and the audiovisuals do a good job, so I don't have any problem with those parts.

The problem, however, is that the solid level design is expected to carry the game alone, while terrible decisions regarding other aspects weigh it down almost every step of the way.

It feels like yet another skeleton of a great game that had the engine stripped down to work on consoles and then dumbed down for a "wider audience", hereby alienating both core Hitman fans and PC gamers. And here I thought these two were your primary demographic.

Here are some bullet points off the top of my head:

• Every time you boot up the game, there will be this unskippable message: "HITMAN WAS DESIGNED BY A MULTICULTURAL STUDIO WHERE STAFF IS OF VARIED ETHNIC BACKGROUNDS". You'll then learn that there are no difficulty options. Savescumming is completely unlimited, and even encouraged by tooltips. Everyone is a winner, let's all hold hands and sing cumbayah. Hey kids, you can play Hitman too! Here are some tooltips that will make the game basically play itself. Scores? Everyone gets the same score! Accident kills or shotguns to the chest, same score! I think you see where this is going.
  
  
• My biggest gripe is that there is no difficulty setting. You can disable psychic powers, seeing through walls, slowing down time and tooltips that hold your hand throughout the game, but this will not affect your score in any way. This is unacceptable for a Hitman game.
  
  
• Your score is not accessible at all during gameplay. If you get spotted, you often won't even notice, or be able to find out until the mission is over. The only way to check your score is to finish the mission. Even then, the scoreboard is minimalistic at best. Despite its' many other faults, Hitman Absolution (2012) did this exceptionally well.
  
  
• The preparation and equipment still pales in comparison to Blood Money (2006). There are no newspaper headlines either. What is new, is the ability to start at predetermined checkpoints (such as starting in the kitchen with a cook disguise), but only if you already completed the mission.
  
  
• Explosion kills of any kind all count as "accident kills". This makes it very easy to cheese, but it doesn't matter since there is no such thing as a "signature kill" or "accident kill" anymore. The score for genius environmental kills or just clicking on someone with a shotgun are the same. They give you more level points, but all that does is unlock new starting locations and starting disguises.
  
  
• There is no penalty for savescumming. The tooltips even encourage it.
  
  
• Some of the stealth mechanics are sloppy and too easy to cheese. There are no difficulty options to reduce their effectiveness.
  
  
• The story and characters aren't bad, but they won't blow your socks off. Let's just say they're interesting when acting naturally during gameplay, and boring in the cutscenes.
  
  
• Releasing the game in episodes may be convenient for the developer, but it certainly isn't for the consumer. They've shot themselves in the foot by failing to explain it properly as well. It is, however, the consumer's fault, for enabling this kind of behaviour with preorder culture, and it is lowering the quality of games in all genres. I won't go as far as calling it beta-testing for money, though, since they are well-designed and have a lot of attention to detail once actually released.
  
  
• Selling the first level is not the way to go, that's what a demo is for. The game is already expensive as is, and the high price for individual levels is terrible value for money. Additionally, if you buy individual levels and decide to buy the full game, you will be stuck paying for them again since it's a bundle. A big ♥♥♥♥ you to the consumer.
  
  
• If you liked the first season (7 levels for 40-60$), then you will love the next one. Be sure to drop 40-60$ for the next batch.

It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, don't get me wrong. The levels are great. Everything else about it, however, is sub-par. I loved the little things, but the big picture is a mess.

The potential is there, but they absolutely have to solve some of the issues I mentioned above. Just introduce difficulty options, fix the scoring system and wait for the price to drop. How hard is that? I won't even mention the sales strategy.

Until they address these points, I'll reluctantly say that Hitman: Absolution was more enjoyable, though I'm sure 90% of you will disagree with me. If you are looking for good a stealth game, I would recommend you get Hitman: Blood Money, MGS5: Phantom Pain or the Batman games. All of them bundled together are likely to cost around the same as this title alone.

You're not allowed to criticise a Dark Souls title in fear of being called a noob, but I'll do it anyway. The camera is awful, all non-xbox controllers are blocked and emulators are getting people banned, mouse & keyboard controls are typical of a console port, the loading screens are typical of a console port and the checkpoint system is questionable at the very least. There also isn't a tutorial and the tooltips could just as well not be there, you'll either be learning from the wiki or not playing it properly.
This game has the exact same problem as Hitman: Absolution, and people bashed the living bejeezus out of that title. Why are the players quiet now? They don't want to be called a noob because Dark Souls is hard, boo hoo. Anyway:

If you get DS3, it will be for one of four things. The fabled difficulty level, the depth of the combat system, PVP or the memes.
I really like the difficulty, especially with how easy games have become nowadays, but only to an extent, why? Unfortunately, the difficulty is part artificial. It is achieved through checkpoint famine. Reaching a boss from a checkpoint usually takes a few minutes not counting the loading screen every single time. I would have much preferred, I'm going to say it, tougher and smarter enemies, than maliciously placed checkpoints and loading screens befitting of a console. Dark Souls 3 itself really isn't as difficult as I thought it would be for the reasons you'd expect. I'm sure you'd get a similar result from God of War on very hard if you removed all the save points.
The combat system is brilliant, and there's really not that much to say about it. You can play the game any way you want. Melee, ranged, magic, heavy weapons, quick weapons, stealthy weapons... but most importantly - meme weapons. You are bound to get a chuckle out of this game once the creative people start showing up, even if they do take your souls.

Overall, Dark Souls 3 is a solid title, but it has serious flaws (many of them non-gameplay such as the camera & lock on controls, by far the worst aspect of this title). If you've played the genre before then I don't have to convince you. If you're new to the series, well, I hope you like difficult games.

And if you're in it for the memes... you will not be disappointed.

EDIT: XCOM2 is saved by the modding community, and by the expansion packs. Common occurence with Firaxis games. Good on them for getting it right in the end, and good on them for supporting modding.
_________________

I thought long and hard about this, but I came to the same conclusion as everyone else.

XCOM2 is a very good, although unfinished game. It's funny to have to call it unfinished seeing how it is basically the exact same thing as XCOM1, running on the same engine, and fundamentally with the same gameplay, albeit with sensible balance improvements. What's new?

• The base is now a spaceship that flies around the map. Instead of building satellites, you build radio towers to gain region bonuses. Regions can be destroyed by terror missions, but you can rebuild them.
  
• Everything has a time limit. Even the map has a time limit. Each month the aliens get +1 victory progress or something like that. You have to take these points away by destroying alien factories. Almost every mission has a turn limit, so no camping.
  
• Three monthly random events, only one of which can be stopped. Lowered income, aliens get poison bullets for a month, more alien reinforcements for a month, +1 alien victory progress etc.
  
• Procedurally generated & fully destructible maps.
  
• Proving Grounds (AKA foundry) projects are now random.
  
• There's a building that lets you respec soldiers or train rookies as a specific class.
  
• A significant increase in customization options
  
• Weapon upgrades
  
• Concealment

These are very welcome and well thought-out mechanics, but it's also where the praise runs out. XCOM2 has all the glitches XCOM1 had, and then some. The optimization is absolutely pathetic - this game has higher requirements than GTA5 and unplayable with any kind of anti-aliasing enabled. During the last mission there were so many enemies on screen that the game's engine kicked the bucket multiple times and gave epileptic textures requiring a reboot.
The action cam is an incredible drag as well. XCOM1 could handle rapid fire in one animation, but XCOM2 pauses the game twice. Or three, or four, or five times. This is ridiculous considering how many abilities let you shoot 3+ times per turn, and since it used to work on the same engine in 2012. It's basically like aircraft animations in Civ5.
The frequent loading screens approach 40 seconds in length, despite using an SSD drive. Also the stats and leaderboards don't work.
One thing to be particularly weary of is being able to destroy the floor underneath an enemy. It seems like a great idea, but it guarantees that enemy will be glitched out and freeze the game for 15 seconds each time it moves or shoots. It also guarantees a desync in multiplayer.

Speaking of which, most disappointing of all is by far the multiplayer. It comes with questionable limitations (only 2 types of each class as opposed to 5, cannot choose weapons, cannot choose armour, not even half of the utility items are available, no PCS, no deep pockets etc.) These are the gameplay aspects. Gameplay aspects, however, do not matter if you can't play the game.
Once again, in this third installment, the multiplayer an unplayable and completely broken mess.. It is beyond unstable. It is even worse than EW, which, in turn, was worse than EU. I have yet to finish a singe game without it collapsing under desyncs and glitches, and finally disconnecting. How hard can it be to do multiplayer in a turn-based game? Legacy XCOM had multiplayer over email for crying out loud. It's unacceptable to sell this game as "having multiplayer".

But enough of that. I was going to give a negative review for as long as the extremely high price coincided with technical issues, but ultimately I chose acquiescence. It's a good game with tons of fantastic little flavours you won't notice, extensive moddability (!) and significantly improved balance (except for that one item). I'm sure that the modders will find a way to improve many completely of the broken aspects that the developers clearly didn't have time to finish.

I'll admit that I was worried about XCOM2 being geared towards "a wider audience", with a huge amount of guaranteed hit, guaranteed miss, guaranteed protection, never trigger overwatch, mind control lasts for ever and other such items & abilities, but they pulled it off just fine, it wasn't as bad as I thought. Token black guy and woman of colour turned out to actually have a personality instead of being there as a strategic resource. Higher difficulty still has an insanely low margin for error. You will always be gradually losing over time. Sometimes a screwup will cost you a near guaranteed game over 3 hours later, but you won't know until then. Time limits work, but they feel like a lazy and artificial solution to mask the AI's shortcomings.

XCOM2 will sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money. This means we'll see a lot more like it, and by that I mean games being released in an unfinished state. The complete lack of optimization feels like penny-pinching to maximise profits at release, while pissing off a lot of people in the long term. The "multiplayer" is blatant false advertising, there is no multiplayer. Personally, I am disappointed and would probably write a negative review if I paid more than I did.

You will have to ask yourself whether the couple of bullet points above are worth the incredibly hefty price tag. As with all Firaxis titles, it is a questionable purchase until an expansion comes out.

MGS5: The Phantom Pain is unique, though not necessarily in a good way. It uses familiar characters to deliver a story that has almost nothing to do with the Metal Gear series, as well as somewhat unfamiliar gameplay. It was clearly intended for a wider audience, meaning that there's less in it for Metal Gear fans. If you enjoy fooling around in Batman or GTA style games then you will enjoy this title. The same goes for OCD patients who are fond of maxing out their score in Hitman games. If you are hoping for a continuation of the Metal Gear series then you are SOL.

The story is pretentious, but well executed. The gameplay is repetitive, even tedious at times, but it works. The unskippable travel sequences add to the already long loading screens, and there are unavoidable credits popping up on the screen before every mission. The controls are not very good even once you get used to them, and the options are lacking, especially the sound options. It is not uncommon to have two or even three layers of voice comm playing simultaneously. I have yet to test the multiplayer properly but from what I can see it is essentially based on everyone using the same super armour and literally rolling for miles, because rolls are still glitched.

Despite all of these problems, and despite not fully living up to the hype, I still enjoyed this title a whole lot. A cautious recommendation of what is very much a love/hate kind of game.

Once again, incompetent devs ruin a game that was perfectly fine beforehand. Why does this keep happening?

A fantastic game for what seems like a short period of time. I would definitely recommend it, but only to fans of the genre who can play it for longer than I did.