#lateviews

Outer Wilds deserves every award it's ever won. This game is a masterpiece of game design. From the music, to the gameplay, to the story, the characters, the music, the locations, the premise. All of it. The flaws that exist pale in comparison to the achievements that are made here. If video games were used as educational materials like “To Kill A Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice”, then this would be a game played by generations in schools across the world. It's an astounding experience that deserves your attention. I'll stop gushing now and try to remain professional. This is an exploration puzzle game set in a fictional solar system. You are the latest member of the “Hearthian” tribe ready to explore the solar system, as your elders have done before you. The entire first village is delicately fabricated to perfectly educate you about the world and your place in it, the game and it's controls, your motives and your goals and it does so in one of the most natural tutorial sequences you've ever seen. You won't even realise you're being taught. Soon you'll have explored the village and you're given the code to allow you access to your spaceship but before you go the game asks you what you're about to do, immediately setting the tone for this adventure. You're going out there because you want to explore. There's so much that's unknown about the solar system and so many places to go that it's a question you may not have an answer for immediately. But before you get there you'll get a hint for one of the core game mechanics. Time travel. Well it's a little more complicated than that but the gist of it is that anytime your character dies you are transported back in time to before you set off to recover the code to your spaceship. This is an interesting twist on games as a whole. Outer Wilds isn't about achieving anything. For a reason I won't spoil, you can only explore the world for a maximum of 22 minutes before you'll find yourself waking up again at the start and any physical progress you made will be reset. But that's okay because you're not trying to **do** anything, you're trying to learn. Your spaceship will also retain knowledge you pickup around the solar system so thankfully this isn't an exercise in memory. The game is immediate in showing you why this is okay. Since you already know the code for your spaceship, there's no need to go all the way to the top of the village to the guy who will tell it to you. Every planet in the system will hold a different story of the mysterious Nomai civilization and their efforts in the solar system that your race now inhabits. Very quickly you will start finding singular (metaphorical) puzzle pieces that begin more questions than they answer with just enough clues for you to find the next, and the previous breadcrumbs. In fitting with the cyclical mechanics of the game, opening doors is not as important as discovering **how** to open doors.

I am not usually one for 'interactive story' type of games. Games such as “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter” or “Gone Home”. For those who feel similar, fret not; Outer Wilds has gameplay beyond reading and investigating. Navigating the environment with your jetpack is enjoyable, especially where the game makes creative use of gravity. While the game does challenge you to discover the full story of the universe, it will also challenge to accomplish more tangible tasks. Tasks like navigating a maze of water spouts, or through icy caves full of a deadly gas. The game does feature a heavy amount of reading, but this is not a glorified book.

I've always felt that the best games are the ones to elicit emotional reactions and this game will play your heart like a fiddle. You **will** feel that burgeoning sense of exploration as the game starts. You **will** feel in awe of the island-lifting tornadoes of Giant's Deep. You **will** feel afraid at the corruptive powers of the Dark Bramble. You **will** feel the trepidation as chunks of Brittle Hollow fall into it's black hole core. As you play Outer Wilds you will visit all of these astronomical wonders and if you care to let the game tell you a story, it will pull at your heart in many many ways.

If you've heard the expression, “Biting off more than you can chew”, then you'll understand how I feel about Absolver. Fans of third-person fighter games like “Dark Souls”, “Devil May Cry” and “God of War” know that these types of games require high levels of love and polish to do well. Despite the starved market, there’s a lot of room for mediocrity. Surprisingly, Absolver doesn't pull any punches and goes toe to toe with the best... until it runs out of steam.

Absolver is a third-person fighter game trying to set itself apart from the crowd using two unique mechanics: stances and the combo builder. The “build your own combo” system has been done before, most notably in “Remember Me” and “God Hand” but the way they combine it with the stances really sets it apart. Each move has a speed and damage rating as well as some of the moves having unique properties like breaking guard and interrupting attacks. There are 4 combat stances, visually corresponding to the direction your torso is facing. Changing stances will result in you turning your torso to face to the left or the right of your opponent while others will leave you with your back facing towards the enemy! Each stance can be assigned an escalating number of light attacks and a heavier “alternate attack”. Most attacks transition you from one stance to another; then, since you’re in another stance, you can immediately use that stances attacks. If you build your combos correctly, you can create loops where one attack will lead into one stance before an attack in that stance returns you to the same stance you started in. The end-result is a custom-built train of attacks that you've personally engineered to confuse opponents as you flow from stance to stance. Since you’re changes stances so often, your alternate attack changes over time. Predicting what move your opponent is currently planning on doing is daunting since there is so much they can do. Oh, and did I tell you that you can pull out a sword or gloves and doing so swaps you over to a brand new page of attacks that you need to customise and memorize?

The game has RPG elements to it as well. Gear will drop from mobs as you down them and you'll also find stashes of gear hidden within piles of rocks. Most interestingly though is how you acquire new attacks. You start the game with a reasonable number of attacks but soon you’ll run into people using 'new' attacks against you and if you block that attack, you'll start learning the move. Use your right thumb-stick ability against it and you'll learn it even faster. Story wise, this is a cool concept. Get punched in a particular way a certain number of times and you should be able to know how your opponent punches like that. Unfortunately, in practice, this just results in you actively not killing your opponents. You end up standing around as they are wailing on you while try to block/dodge/parry all their moves; grinding out all the moves before you move along. There is a risk/reward system at play here wherein all the learning you've done during a fight won't be saved until you kill the opponent and exit combat, but there is a lot of moves to learn from random grunts in the world and these don’t really pose a threat once you’ve got a handle on the game. This system gets even worse when you're trying to discover sword specific moves because swords are rare, and by the time you find someone wielding one, they are normally a very strong opponent and you can't afford to grind out these moves because you won’t survive unless you actively damage them.

That's pretty much the entire game. Fight, learn moves, earn gear, equip said moves and gear, repeat. Thankfully that's not as bad as it sounds because hey, it's a fighting game. You came here to fight. So why am I so disappointed in it? Well before I get to the big one, let me just rattle off a few smaller impressions the game left on me: ●       Falling off ledges is far too easy. Admittedly this is a designed mechanic; forcing someone up to a ledge and just pushing them off with attacks is a legitimate way to win a fight but it still felt like it was far too easy to just slip off. Even with nobody attacking you as you’re navigating the environment, one foot off the path might mean falling and most of the time falling is death, because when it's not instant, the insane fall damage will ensure you lose the fight that you just dropped into.

●       The environment is not easy to find your way around. The “map” you're given is essentially 3 circles, and you don't know where you are unless you sit at a bonfire an energy shard thingy or kill a boss as these are the only 2 markers on the map. Many times, vital paths that you NEED to go down are not highlighted or made evident in any way and are sometimes, out-rightly obscured. As a result of this, I completely missed an entire area of the game for a long period of time simply because I couldn’t find the path AND I thought I had already entered that area of the map… There's a time and a place to do-away with the hand holding evident in modern game design but this is too far the other way.

●       Maybe why the environment is so convoluted is to try to hammer in this sense of mystery that the game is so stubbornly trying to instil. The game makes a point of telling you NOTHING about where you are, who you are, what you're doing or why. Thankfully it does tell you what to do (fight people and open a door). It just comes across as entitled. There IS an interesting world here but by the end of the game, nothing is explained at all. Who am I? Why did I teleport when I put on this mask? Why do I need to kill these people? Did I travel through time? Who is this chick with a sword? Who were the people who were here before? The game makes a point in referring to the tesseract-looking particle effect that happens as you kill others, get killed yourself or even unsheathing your sword as “folding” which seems really cool! To sum up my feelings on the aesthetics and lore of the game, I have two words. Obnoxiously Mysterious

Finally, the big one. The game ends. It just ends. No big finish, no special reveal, no closure. Nothing. If you remember before, I mentioned the map being 3 circles? That's it. That's the whole game. I have FOUR HOURS in Absolver, and it's finished. The entire story-mode. That's a third of the I spent in DMC and less than a 10th of the time I spent in Sekiro. Now sure, those are AAA titles with massive budgets behind them, but I cannot help but feel starved of content, especially since the story does not wrap itself up. The game starts with you and a bunch of other initiates standing in an arctic wind before you are chosen, you don a mask and teleport to another world. You then traverse through 12 named areas (3 of which contain nothing) fighting 11 different bosses. There are probably below 50 enemies to fight in the entire game. And then you're done. After fighting the somehow important Risryn, you're teleported back to the place you started with, you graduate from being a “prospect” to become an “Absolver”, you get a neat cape and you get told, “Idk, wait around and grind a bit I guess?” before it teleports you back to the “hub”. To put this in perspective, if the game had 3 times as much content as it currently does, I would still probably call the game short. I have no idea why (besides development problems) the game ended when it felt like Act 2 should have begun.

The game tries to justify this by placing a big emphasis on PVP. There is a system to look up other players and have a tussle and the game is always online so you might find people in the world and decide to start smacking one another but if the game is dead (like it was when I got to it) then all the PVP is non-existent. That's not even mentioning the players who don't WANT to fight other people. As far as I can tell the “latest” addition to the game included the “downfall” mode. This mode (only available after you have graduated to be an absolver) is randomly generated rooms of goons to fight endlessly. The lore explanation for this area only adds questions to the already tall pile of unanswered ones. The game allows you to fight bosses again at a harder difficulty, but this is locked behind PVP progress…meaning that if you weren’t able to find a game like myself, then you just can’t

I hate having to be so negative. Other indie games cater themselves to a casual market and can have all the depth of a puddle and still receive high ratings but because the devs took on such a loved genre, all the depth they have added only makes people want more. I mean really, if my biggest complaint about the game is that I wanted more, there's got to be something good about it. In shooting for the stars, the devs came up short, but the time, skill and effort they put into trying to get there far exceeds a lot of other developers. I can say that the game was bug free and (until it ended) felt close to a AAA title and the sad thing is that it starts to get judged by those harsh standards. For a AAA title, this would be an insult; But for a fighting game? This is a worthwhile experiment; for an indie game? This is one heck of an accomplishment and for your time? This is worth it.

SirYaBH could pretty accurately be described as a survival horror game. The premise of the game is that you are a boffin who, after tinkering a bit too much in the lab, has gone and gotten themselves teleported to another world. What a pickle! In order to return you'll have to gather pieces of the machine and return them to your entry point into the world. So the game is a giant fetch quest? Yes, but don't let that hurt your expectations. That is just the vehicle to get you moving. The macguffins are scattered around the archipelago you find yourself in and are guarded by killer aristocratic robots. Defeat and evading those robots makes up the majority of the gameplay.

But before you can take them on you're going to need some gear. You get can get gear by looting the abandoned buildings that dot the landscape. Looting begets of the games core mechanics, inventory management. Each item you pickup will take up space and your backpack has a limited amount of that. It might be healthy to carry around 10 bandages but that is going to limit the amount of space you have for other items. You can store items in containers around the world but you run the risk of that stash being guarded the next time you return. Ultimately you're here to find the machine pieces and some of those can take up a whopping 16 spaces. If you don't have enough space to grab it then you're in for a bad time because you'll only discover that you're out of space AFTER you've sprinted in to wrench the piece out of the ground, which is roughly the same time you should be booking it to escape the guards. Balancing the amount of ammo, food, tools and free space you're currently carrying is an exciting and dynamic puzzle.

Aside from items you find, your second biggest tool at your disposal is your ability to not be seen. At all times, in your lower left corner you'll have a visibility meter that will let you know how easily the robots can see you. Moving faster makes you easier to see. Crouching makes you less visible. Pretty standard stuff. The brilliant factor is how the game factors in your environment. Crouch down in an empty field or the middle of the road and you'll still be pretty visible, but do the same in a patch of dense grass and you won't be seen unless you're stood on. This means the environment is not just a backdrop. You're constantly afraid of open spaces and find yourself hugging walls and sprinting to dense foliage. The stealth is so natural and organic that you don't even notice you're playing a game anymore. When you're spotted, the robots will emit a sharp bleep noise to alert you to their alertness. In a genius move, you're given a split second to return to stealth before they realise it's you and start firing. It's thrilling to dance right around this edge of notice-ability and this system let's you stay right on that line. Additionally, because of this leeway, the game can afford to take away liberties elsewhere while still making the game feel fair. That bleep is the only warning you'll get before buckshot starts flying by your head. If you get found, you do have the choice of fight or flight but the former is only available once you've found yourself a piece of weaponry and the ammo to use it. A rare and limited commodity. Overall the game strikes a perfect balance of difficulty in both stealth and combat.

My final paragraph today will be about the environment. The feel of the game and the atmosphere. It cannot be overstated how much this game draws you in. A constant drone hangs in the air and it shifts and mutates as you move through the world. One moment a forest may be singing for your attention and the next a nearby town howls. Stand too close to the water and you'll be treated to a showing of the lovecraftian horror that haunts the shallows surrounding the islands. Innocent bright blue wisps break up the drab colour palette of the environment as they meander towards your goals, almost like they are leading you. There's giant balloon floating to the south. It whips it's searchlight this way and that, ready to attract the entire island's guardians to your location. Rabbits and grouse will shuffle out of your way as you approach. Troupes of robots patrol the landscape as they attempt to “FIND THE TRESSPASSER”. One of them says, “I'M SO WEALTHY IT'S OUTRAGEOUS”. As the game progresses, stronger enemies will come out to play, like the landowner. He stomps around with his cane, calling out for you. He is impossible to kill but will kill you in a single blow, if only he could catch you. This game dunks you into the flow zone in seconds and never let's you out. Don't mind the voice acting though... it's a little... amateur, I'll admit.

I remember first seeing Furi when a youtuber played it. He only ever got past the first boss and I guess he or the audience didn't like it enough because there was never a second video. I however, did like the look of it, and could not remember the name and searched for the game for a long time. Finally, in this most recent of steam sales, I found it again.

Furi is a fusion of 3rd person fighter and a twin-stick shooter. It's also a boss rush game in a very literal sense. When you're not fighting a boss you're just walking. It's very slow and pretty boring. You get some exposition from this rabbit-headed-spirit-guide character but it's so monotonous that developers put in an “Auto-walk” button so you don't need to pay any attention. This turns the walking segments into glorified cutscenes and whilst I'm quite confident saying they're the worst part of the game, there's only two parts in the whole game. Fighting and walking.

The game does a good job of providing unique experiences for each fight. Although the enemies all have the same basic attacks, the way they combine them means that they all feel very different. For instance there is one character who has a sword and shield. The shield is very apt at reflecting projectiles which leads you to use more sword attacks. Then another boss has wings and flies around, making it very difficult to land any sword attacks at all. The game does a bang-up job at teaching at times and a horrible job at others. The first boss has a few extra health bars with which it teaches you the basic controls and it flashes the button prompt to alert you to how to play. Other controls it simply won't tell you about, like how you can use the right thumbstick to charge up your suit when you're in close quarters mode, or that you can charge up your dash/dodge.

Probably it's biggest achievement is how it eases you into each boss. Let me take a step back here and describe how the health system works. Both you and the boss have multiple health bars. You beat up the boss enough to deplete their health bar and it'll prompt you to run up to the boss and lock them into close quarters, this will then allow you to fully destroy their health bar so that it can't regenerate. And regenerate it will if you let your health bar deplete. Think of it like a 1 on 1 fighting game and how they have rounds. Each time you or your opponent depletes a health bar, both parties are healed and you go again. This cultivates a system that is very forgiving in the best of ways. You can lose 90% of your health bar but as long as you kill them before you lose that 10%, then you'll heal it all back. So when each boss has all their health bars and they will dish out their attacks slowly and then amp it up as you defeat each health bar. For instance one character might charge up and shoot a laser directly at you, where another boss might come in for 2 melee attacks. Then once you have defeated their health bar, they'll kick it into 2nd gear, and now when they charge up a laser, it will actually shoot 3 in a cone, and when they melee, they'll do a 3 attack combo instead. Until the very last health bar where they shift into their final form and hit you with a limit break, they still attack like themselves. For example, the shielded enemy will still alternate between melee attacks and wave attacks, and as the battle goes on, the melee attacks will remain melee attacks, and the wave attacks will get bigger and harder to dodge, but they'll still be wave attacks. He doesn't suddenly pull out a gun and start shooting to catch you by surprise, he surprises you by preying on the fact that you think you can predict his every move.

Overall the story is pretty weak. Something about you being in prison but then there's another prison and who is this bunny-masked man? The game acts cooler than it is but the good thing is that you won't care when you're in the thick of it. Voice acting is hit or miss. Some characters are voiced well and others are just... slightly off. The bunny-man is one of the off characters and unfortunately, you're having to listen to him constantly.

I feel this review is more pertinent than ever due to the new DLC coming out a few days ago. I worry that I lot of people will see the DLC drop and decide to buy into the franchise because they want to ride cool mech suits. Let me give you a spoiler, that's not happening, at least not for a while. I've actually been sitting on this review for a long time but I've always put it off because ARK: Survival Evolved is one heck of a big game. Anyway, here goes. For the purposes of most of this review I'm going to ignore all the DLC but I will mention it in it's own section.

My time in ARK was mostly spent solo or with a singular friend I have. This is important to note because ARK is actually an MMORPG. Yeah, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, this is a game designed around having a large open world with other players in it that remains constantly alive so that things are happening even when you're not around. I do recommend you play with a small tribe though because I personally find the online servers to be a waste of time. This game has been out for so long now that every server is covered in forts and settlements that cover vast swaths of the map. If you're looking to start out by yourself, at best, large walls prohibit your movement and block access to areas while simultaneously tanking your frames due to the HUNDREDS of dinosaurs stored within. At worst, these forts kill you on site with unmanned laser turrets from a distance equal to 20 times the range of your wooden spear. If you want to play online, start in your internet browser. Find a tribe's website, ask to join and if you convince them you can successfully skip playing the game. You'll now probably find yourself with end game gear, dinosaurs and weapons and you can now stop playing because you win the game. I'm getting ahead of myself, let's pretend you're not using the online maps. What is ARK? Well it markets itself as a survival game and at least in the beginning it is. You start by picking up rocks and punching trees to make tools to help you pick up rocks and bash trees more effectively. Each time you level up you get a skill point to put into one of your stats and some points to put into “buying” engrams (crafting schematics). Now that you've unlocked an engram, you'll probably want to craft it. As you work on crafting that, you'll probably level up again. This opens up more engrams. More engrams means more things for you to craft. This is a very effective feedback loop and will keep you busy for hours. One of the big reasons it'll keep you busy is that one of the items you'll end up crafting is a saddle. Saddles can be used to ride dinosaurs. Now, not all dinosaurs can be ridden but all dinosaurs can be tamed so each time you unlock the ability to make a saddle, you'll now have two jobs to do: Craft the saddle, tame the dino it goes on. This gives the game an almost pokemon feel as you knock out Dodo's and convince them to be your friend by feeding them berries. Dodo's are as useless as you might think but other animals are actually exceptionally helpful and will expedite your progression. An early example of this is the Parasaur. Parasaur's are herbivorous animals that will harmlessly roam around the starting areas of the island and once you've learned how to craft a club and a bolas, you can stun and club one until it's unconscious (the majority of dinosaurs are tamed by knocking them out and feeding them). With the parasaurs saddle, you can now ride it. It provides you with portable storage and although it's run speed is slower than yours, it can run for much, much longer. It also can harvest berries for you. En masse! It can also harvest thatch and wood from trees although it's not very efficient at doing so but it does all this without using up any tool durability or consuming your stamina. The usefulness only goes up from there with some dinosaurs being able to uproot entire forests in seconds and others able to crush rocks in a single swing, spewing out many more resources than you would have been able to mine by hand. It's safe to say that taming is a huge part of ARK and it's one of the more enjoyable parts.

The “crafting, taming, levelling up” loop will last you quite some time but survival games need more than just surviving to be good. Eventually you'll be asking what's next. Now, you will notice foreboding alien pillars rising high into the clouds all across the island and you might think that this is where you need to go and indeed going there is a challenge but arriving is not as rewarding as you want it to be. Here is where the game falls down in terms of conveyance. So far the game hasn't needed to spell things out to you. There is no tutorial message telling you to punch dodo's or to make a house. You just did those things because they made sense. Same as you went to investigate the pillars because it made sense to go see them. When you arrive though you'll receive no instructions. The console in the middle of the obelisk will cryptically mention something about a broodmother and a dragon and offer no explanation. You'll return to your house lost and in a daze. What is your purpose? Well, you need to go to the wikipedia for the game. Turns out you've just started the dungeon grind and nobody told you. This isn't bad in and of itself but I would have enjoyed some booming alien voice telling me to seek the dungeons out. Anyway yes, the game has dungeons (remember, it's an MMO) and you will need to be prepared for them. The majority of caves (caves = dungeons) on the island will result in your death the first time you go in them. Some of them are especially unfair like the poison cave which will, well, poison you. But it doesn't say this it just makes your health go down and again, it won't tell you why so you google it and find out you need a gas mask. An item I still haven't unlocked after 360 hours of play. With heavy dose of googling, the dungeons are a fine challenge. They provide you with the drive to escape your manufactured comfort zone that all survival games need. Still though, what's after that? When does the game end? Well after doing a few dungeons and some more googling you'll find that completion of the island involves defeating every dungeon multiple times in order to farm the artifacts needed to summon boss fights who's items are needed to open the dungeon of the final boss atop a volcano at the centre of the map. Again, none of this is spelled out or explained in-game.

So let's move right along into the first of the negatives about the game. The fact that it's designed to be an MMO. In an MMO, when you go to bed for the day or while you're at work, people in your tribe across the world are waking up and logging on for a session. It doesn't even matter what they do, the point is that they'll be progressing your tribe in some way. The game is balanced around the fact that multiple people, 24/7, will be working on these goals. It's just such a bizarre and disheartening change because up until this point you have felt like you're progressing at a normal rate. Imagine any other RPG you know, and then imagine that at what should be the halfway point of your progression, the game suddenly multiplies the amount of time it'll take for you to achieve your next goals. You will go from needing 50 metal to make an axe to 200 metal to make a gun and 1000 metal to make a more advanced gun. Once you complete a few dungeons and start eyeing a boss, the progression hits a ramp that's so steep it feels like a wall. You might log on and play for an hour and only make a dent in the task that's in front of you.

The other big problem with this game is how buggy it is. On the low end is predators being able to climb walls and cliffs that should be completely impassable. Also on the low end is how predators aren't smart enough to go around walls and cliffs that are completely impassable. On the high end, dying inside a cave will cause you to lose all your items permanently unless you know a very specific method for breaking the game. Skip this paragraph if you don't care for the example: I believe it has to do with the fact that the game will unload the cave once you die (because nobody is inside it) and since there is no more cave, your dead body will fall into the void below the kill plane. Even if you turn on the hax and noclip down to the void, the kill plane will respawn you above ground. You need to combine console commands to turn off the kill plane just to get your stuff, and now you'll fall forever if you don't teleport yourself above ground. Oh, but the ground doesn't exist for you anymore and you need to log out of the game and log back in just for physics to resume working again. All of this was because you died in one of the hardest parts of the game.

Alright, here's my bit about the DLC. The three paid maps are Scorched Earth, Aberration and Extinction. These are all fine additions. I haven't played extinction yet but both Scorched Earth and Aberration add many new engrams and entirely new worlds to explore. Aberration in particular has a whole new set of rules that you need to follow and I feel safe in saying, do not attempt to play these before putting a lot of hours into the island. Aberration will chew you up and spit you back out, again and again. It was kind enough to include a “starter” area but there's no water source in that area so... whoops? Scorched Earth would feel mostly normal if it weren't for the fact that you'll be dying of dehydration in seconds. Let me put it this way, I played Aberration with a new character and it was really hard and not entirely enjoyable for a long time. Do you remember everything that I mentioned above about dodo's, taming and a general sense of progression brought about naturally by the levelling system? Yeah that doesn't really apply in Aberration. The game asks you to have items you don't have yet constantly and if you do manage to get yourself set up you feel trapped because your safe space only goes so far and the area outside of that is so hostile that you feel you'll never be able to go out there. For Scorched Earth me and my friend tried something different. We ported our characters over from the island (this is a mechanic of the game. You can port dinosaurs over too) and thus while we still had no items we at least had enough stats to survive and the engrams to make the tools to survive. Even when I ported my character back across I could then start a new character to inherit all the equipment and the shelter my high level character had made and it made the game so much more enjoyable. In short, the DLC should be treated like an expansion pack. Something to do AFTER the island. This is why I mentioned that you shouldn't expect to play Extinction right away. Ideally, you'd want to have completely finished the island, Scorched Earth and Aberration before attempting Extinction but if you're impatient you'll still want to spend a few hours on the island to get some experience. One quick thing to mention, even if you don't buy the DLC, the game will install it for you in case another player does (remember, MMO). At least on my PC the game is now a whopping 150gb. Just something to keep in mind.

Don't be so quick to dismiss this game. If you're like me you baulk at the idea of most “simulator” games as a specialised product for a niche market and for most simulators, this is true. Euro Truck Sim 2 definitely seems like it was initially designed with this purpose in mind but it's been handled with enough care that the game is appealing to people who've never been interested in trucks, Europe or simulators.

You probably don't need me to spell out what the game is on the surface. You drive a truck. The game begins with your character finally achieving their “dream” of owning a trucking company. Although really this “company” is just you owning a run down shed in a bad neighbourhood and your only valuable asset is your truck driving licence. You don't even own a truck so you're going to have to approach freight companies offering your services. These jobs ease you into your new career by comping fuel, repair and toll expenses into your contract and you just teleport to and from the start and end locations. Over time you explore more towns and discover truck dealerships in them. It is not quick but you will earn enough money to finally purchase your first truck (you'll probably take a bank loan. Don't feel ashamed). Once you get your own truck the game suddenly feels like an open world RPG. No really, you no longer teleport at the ends of jobs. You actually need to drive to the place to get the job and if you're late, that job has gone to somebody else. You become painfully aware of all these awesome upgrades you could apply to your business or your truck... if only you had enough money. And now that you're now the one paying for tolls, fuel and repairs so you had best be on your best behaviour if you want to buy them.

Now, so far this might not seem like an enjoyable experience. I mean it's a job right? Who would want to go to work in their spare time? Well, it's the job that sucks, the work is enjoyable. Performing a task is inherently satisfying. In a job, this is typically overshadowed by the physical, emotion and mental toll on us. In ETS2, this doesn't apply. If you're sick of it, you can quit. If you mess up, reload a save. What ETS2 gives you is the satisfaction of doing a job with much of the struggle taken out of it. The game front-loads the best bits of this truck driving career fantasy and gives you the best bits of life with the ugly bits cut out. The game never tells you to go out and work, you go out and work because you want the rewards. On the shallow end, you get paid. Money can be spent on truck upgrades, custom built trailers, new buildings to use as headquarters for your business. You can even hire other drivers to work for your company. On the deep end though, the game gives you a “Sense of Pride and Accomplishment”^TM. When you roll into the depot with your trailer at 100% integrity and you park your trailer in no time at all, the game tells you “Excellent!”. Green numbers flash over your screen, and then other numbers get bigger! You drive away from the depot looking back and knowing that yeah, you did that. You got the freight from Point A to Point B. Alright time for the negative section, but first a little disclaimer. I played this using an Xbox controller on my PC, so I have access to the keyboard as well. Make no mistake, this is NOT the optimal way to play the game. This game, more than anything else makes me want to buy a wheel and pedal setup and a VR headset to go with it. That said my setup is miles better than simply keyboard and mouse and I find it quite satisfactory. I've even invited a friend to play and while I handle the keyboard controls like some sort of co-pilot. Don't feel like you can't play this game without a wheel. This game has a ton of options and if you go through them you'll find a system you like. I found the default controller sensitivity to be far too low and it made parking a nightmare until I changed it. My only real negative comment is that progress is rather slow. The slow burn could be appealing to some people and it doesn't feel lengthy for lengths sake so I've forgiven the game. Even once you're high enough level to start doing jobs for >€ 30/km it'll still take 10+ perfect jobs to start thinking about upgrading your headquarters (and these jobs are not quick).

Some may call Payday 2 a heist simulator but it's more like a heist fantasy simulator. As in this is the illustrious life you might for a half-second believe that criminals live while you work a dead-end job. The game takes a loose approach to it's grounding in reality and for that they're rewarded with loads of creative freedom. And the devs have taken it and run with it. In fact they're still running with it. I believe DLC is still being made for the game as I write this. If you've ever dreamed about robbing a bank while also being a superhero, this is the game for you.

Most of your time in the game will be spent shooting. At it's core this is a wave-based first person shooter but the brilliance is in the bells and whistles that come along with it. If it were just shooting police then this would become pretty stale but thankfully, outside of some very avoidable missions, you're never just shooting cops. Every mission has objectives to accomplish. Take a simple bank job for instance. You start in casing mode. No masks on so you are harder to detect but you can't do anything illegal or suspicious. You and your crew take note of cameras, guards, civilians. When you do finally mask up, you have a plan. You march in, one guy takes out the camera's, another two take down the guards. You're on civilian duty. You get everyone down on the floor. You tie them up so they can't run for the panic button. Someone goes to fetch the drill for the vault. Now so far everything has gone according to plan but what if someone messes up. A camera you didn't see, a civilian who walks past on the street, phones the cops. A guard who comes back from his break. Now the alarm is blaring and cop cars are pulling up outside. You start trying to get the hostages further inside so the cops can't free them. Someone else has found a safe in the managers office and is setting up a drill for it. The other guys are shooting the cops as they come but they have to fall back inside because the cops set up sniper teams. Now the vault is open. Cops are streaming in through every opening the building has but somebody has to go inside to bag up the cash. You're inside bagging cash while someone is sawing open safe deposit boxes. Two guys are outside taking down cops but suddenly, one of them goes down, you stop bagging to go help him but the other guy outside has it handled. Now you're outside the vault and you're getting shot at, you shoot back. It's this hectic amalgam of objectives that fuels the enjoyment of Payday 2. There's always something to do and never enough time to do it. After every single heist you finish in Payday 2, you'll release a breath you didn't realise you were holding in and smile to yourself at what a cracking good job you did. It's satisfying through and through.

If I had to have criticisms with the game, it's that the base game feels like a shell of the “Ultimate Edition”. Buy the base game and you'll constantly come across walls of DLC. It's everywhere; from collectibles to new missions, new guns, masks, characters. Admittedly, this game has one of the best DLC policies of modern games. You can play DLC missions if someone with the DLC hosts it. Most weapons are comparable anyway so it's not any stronger to buy them. New masks and characters are cosmetic only and you can still have them on your team if the AI randomly chooses them or if someone playing as that character joins. It just goes to show that DLC sucks even when it's done well. You won't be penalised for buying the normal edition as the upgrade to the ultimate edition is discounted   once you have the normal edition.

The other kinda lame part is that money doesn't matter. I mean maybe a bit at the beginning of the game when you don't own anything except an undying need to buy everything in sight but eventually you have a handful of masks you like and one or two guns you use and then money just doesn't matter. If money doesn't matter, why bother trying to get more loot from missions? Why do missions at all? The answer is because it's fun and once you wrap your head around that it becomes clear but I do wish that there was some money-sink in the game so I really felt rewarded for earning that dosh.

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/92vspi/lateviews_the_forest/

The Forest is a confused game. It doesn't play to it's own strengths and this can lead to frustrations and apathy. Still, the co-op aspect of it makes it enjoyable you will have some fun playing it. Get it on sale and it probably won't be the worst money you've ever spent.

Let's start with the combat because it's the most pushed of the game mechanics. By pushed I mean that the game pushes the fighting on you, a lot. Anytime from the second day onwards, the natives of the island will make themselves known to you. Initially they are hesitant to attack and may even run away from you but eventually every encounter with the natives turns into a fight. The AI in The Forest is abysmal. The enemies don't feel real. They don't react in believable ways and they are completely unpredictable. They are so erratic that it's impossible to judge what their next move will be. There are no clever decisions to make in combat. Either you get the first blow and the hitstun from it will allow you to continue attacking until they die or the natives random AI patterns devise that they are going to launch enough lightning fast attacks that you die lest you remembered to hold up your block. Succeeding in combat isn't making decisions, it's exploiting the enemy's AI. And you need to exploit the game or you die. Nothing changes later on when you end up encountering mutated enemies. You get stuck with the same ultimatum. Take advantage of the poor pathfinding and get them stuck on a ledge, or hop on the ledge yourself and pelt them with projectiles. Even when you fail in combat, there's no danger. You respawn at the plane and you just need to walk to where your body is and pick up your stuff. It's just tedious to die. Combat is just a chore that constantly gets in the way of you trying to have fun.

Speaking of chores, the survival mechanics have the same design philosophy. Take advantage of the system or die. I get the sense that the game wants you to forage for berries and kill wildlife to survive but it's just designed so poorly. Rabbits, Deer, Lizards and Squirrels are all not worth hunting unless you need their respective pelts. The AI once again, feels broken. Most of the time if you step within a few metres of the animal it'll zoom off in the opposite direction and if the opposite direction happens to be a cliff or a body of water, they will just run around in circles, whizzing past you with so much speed they are impossible to hit with an axe. Although sometimes, you'll find a lizard just chilling by your feet, not yet aware of the fact that you're standing above it. So why bother hunting them when you can just kill turtles and birds? Turtles spawn along the beach every day and produce enough food that you'll never go hungry. They don't fight back or run away. The same mostly applies for birds who's landing animation is so slow that it takes no effort to catch them. Managing health and water is insultingly trivialised. There are 2 water sources in the game. One hurts to drink from and the other doesn't. It doesn't take long to construct the rain catcher and then you'll never be thirsty ever again. Health can be restored by eating food and sleeping but the amount restored seems to vary on factors outside your control. It is much simpler just to consume the medication that you find in abundance from discarded plane luggage around the world.

So what's the appeal of The Forest? The first is the construction. Opening your survival book for the first time is often a shock. There are pages and pages of structures you can build. Tree houses, house boats, drying racks, zip-lines. You can even build custom houses as big and as intricate as you want. There is so much to build... and all of it is pointless unless you're already abusing the game. Most structures you build on the mainland of the game will be destroyed by the natives. There is no feasible way to protect your house from the natives without devoting 100% of your attention to it. You'll find yourself endlessly repairing walls in an attempt to hold them off. And you'll never get to move onto the gameplay that is actually enjoyable. That is of course unless you build on one of the tiny islands just off the coast. Then the natives will never reach your house but at that stage you're just exploiting the system again!

The other truly enjoyable part of The Forest is the spelunking. There are a number of different cave systems and each of them contains secrets and collectibles all over the place. It's dark, it's spooky and exciting. You need to balance using your map and using your torch to find your way around and you're rewarded with better gear (such as a modern axe, a radio to replenish stamina or a sword). This aspect of the game is also ruined by the enemies. It's so dark that you require a light source to see. You know what isn't a light source? Your weapons. In co-op it's manageable because one person runs around in circles with a torch while the other engages in combat but once again, these enemies are getting in the way of you having fun.