Recent reviews by Rocksu

I played through Baldurs Gate 2 before playing this. I was interested to compare them as I heard some claims that story is better in 2 than in 3 etc.

For that I'd say its very much a matter of taste, which plot you like more kind of deal. BG3 has more branching for the outcome of the story however, even though you still get railroaded to the same destinations. Gameplay is definitely much more polished in BG3 than in BG2, but that is just the product of the times.

Gameplay. Turn based combat that Larian Studios has shown to do well in their previous games is here. Problems have many solutions. Good example being that you can activate buttons and levers by throwing items or shooting them. Only negative I'd give is that you are not allowed to undo movement. The game does its best to help you calculate where your character needs to be standing to cast a spell but it can make mistakes, costing you movement resources. In these cases it would make sense to let the player redo their movement as long as no attack of opportunities or action points were spent. So be careful with your actions. Too many times I tried to click on an enemy to attack it but my cursor happens to be be clicking the empty space between their legs, causing my character to instead move. Or the camera deciding to move on its own right as I was about to click where I want to move, making me run the opposite way instead.

Production quality. This will blow you away. Everything is voice acted, no matter how minor the character. Even animals when you use animal speech. There are some bugs though. I had a quest disappear from my quest log but the marker for it still showed up in my map, I had cutscene at the very end get stuck unless I clicked skip on it after every characters line of dialogue. I had a character comment on an item my party had, even though I succeeded all rolls to keep said item a secret from them. Little things like that.

Romance. I heard that the character in this game used to be very horny, always coming on to the player whenever you were spending the night at the camp. It seems this was patched, because this never happened to me. It seems the player has to make the first move if they want to engage in romance. I wasn't really interested in romance so I welcome this change. My friend described it as awkward and tiring to have to reject every party member one by one.

Characters. It is possible to miss core party members in the first act, losing them forever. You'll end up missing out on some pretty good quest lines involving them, like slaying ancient evil beings or exploring temples of an evil goddess. For this I recommend to look up online how to recruit each core party member in act 1 so you don't miss out on this content, just in case.

Despite the few shortcomings and annoyances listed here, this was still the best RPG I have ever played.

Brings a ton of new challenges to the base game. Every planet is its own entire new system of how to process materials, like you're playing a whole different game on each individual planet.

Biters on the original planet are still a massive pain, even when I adjusted their spreading speed to slower than default, they still surprised me often with how fast they have three new hives around an area I had just cleared with artillery.

To anyone new to this game, don't ignore any new tech you unlock. Don't go thinking "Eh learning how to setup logistics robots is not worth the hassle" or "I don't really need a personal power reactor or exoskeleton". All those things make dealing with the massive construction projects a breeze.

Eventually I got bored and found myself not bothering to launch this game.

Whats good: Very well made world full of little details to make it feel alive. Any hardcore Harry Potter fan would most likely be delighted.

The bad: Well I am not a hardcore Harry Potter fan and was looking for a good game. Sadly I find this game very boring. Combat is barely good enough but not too interesting. You just spam attack and cast shield spell or dodge roll when the game says you should.

Potion crafting system that is designed to waste your time. Gearing system that doesn't really matter. Leveling system that doesn't really matter. Its like they put these mechanics in only because many other games have these mechanics, without any proper thought put into them. If this game was made in early 90's then I bet there would have been floating coins for you to collect.

Finally the poor job with the PC port. You cannot play this game in fullscreen mode without running at your monitors native resolution. There is no exclusive fullscreen mode and borderless locks you into native resolution. This is a problem if you have a 4K or 8K monitor but your GPU can't quite handle those resolutions with max settings, so you'd rather play at 2K. This is especially bad if you want to enable raytracing. You're forced to play in windowed mode.

This is a really good souls like. I'd put this somewhere among the top 10 of all the games in this genre.

A fun and interesting boomer shooter. The good old classic uninterrupted gameplay with interesting levels to explore combined with solid first person shooting mechanics. Bunny hopping works and is fun.

Finally finished it and killed every boss including the optional ones.

They somehow managed to make an open world map that is better than in the main game, which was already the best open world map I've ever seen in any game. Exploring it was fun as hell.

Now to the recurring issue with this game: The bosses. You're going to probably have to redo your build a couple of times for the last boss. In my case I had to burn all my larval tears to try out different builds. In the end it was satisfying to beat the final boss, so I guess I still considered it fair, unlike Malenia, who I've beaten three times and I never felt good about it. It always felt like a chore I got out of the way. Bayle is absolutely the best boss fight this whole game has now. It is punishing and has no rollcatch traps or delayed attacks mixed with instant attacks, just pure fair fun, much more like the older Dark Souls bosses.

Now sad to say the game has performance issues. Framerate tanks on the final boss when it is charging a specific attack. One NPC summon is bugged, where it often gets stuck outside the fog gate and sometimes just dies without even entering the arena.

I watch both my GPU and CPU usage remain below 50% (and none of my CPU threads max out) but game refuses to go higher than 30fps when there are more than 3 NPC's around. If I am alone in the wilderness my GPU is finally allowed to work hard and game reaches 60fps. Then on top of that, cutscene audio desyncs if you play this game on any resolution higher than 1080p. Framerate remains consistent 60fps through the entire cutscene, but audio still plays ahead by almost 10 seconds.

It is a good game. Nowhere near as good as Sekiro but better than Dark Souls 3. It is a souls game where you don't need to watch a lore youtuber explain you the story. I heard claims that this is a "parry focused souls game" and I can see why some may think that as successful parrying is tied to many perks and amulets, where it becomes a necessity for almost all boss fights to learn to parry, but there are some moments where dodging is the far superior tactic. For example, there was this one boss that kept melting my stamina and then my health with a long combo that I could never fully parry, but then that combo was trivialized by simply dodging to the side repeatedly. What I am saying is, you need to know when to dodge and when to parry. If it gets overwhelming, just block and respond with some counter attacks, you regain health you lost from guarding by attacking.

Now some negatives, levels were too long in my opinion. Too often I simply wished for them to end already and let me fight another boss, but the same humanoid monsters in the same long sets of corridors and rooms just kept going. On my New Game playthrough I just ran past all enemies and it still felt too long.
Finally the specter system. Right before boss rooms you can summon an AI controlled specter to fight with you. I am not all that against this as if you simply don't wish to bother with a boss fight on your 2nd or 3rd playthrough you can utilize the specter to skip past it faster. But the bosses focus the specter way too much, making you more of a spectator to the fight until the incredibly tanky specter or the boss dies. So if you want, you can trivialize lot of bosses with the specter and then be left with a feeling of being ignored in the fight.

Still this was overall a good game. Well worth the price I paid in the steam sale.

You play as a guy who is forced to play Pony Island in hell.

Best games of this series I've ever played. For those unfamiliar, this game is played like a Visual Novel where you need to find evidence in environments and match said evidence to witness statements that contradict them. There is never a way to soft lock yourself, the game prevents you from progressing further unless you have all the necessary evidence you need to progress. But you can suffer a game over if you make too many false attempts at connecting the dots.

This is a collection of two games in the series. You don't need to play any of the earlier games as the story in these two is separate from all others of this series.