Recent reviews by shadowmar

Battle Pass.

extremely fun and solid 3D platformer with excellent movement and lots of fun upgrades to mix and match with, if they add a level editor in the future, this game will basically be perfect

it's pretty good if it runs well on your system but unfortunately it probably won't

Icarus is a weird game, it started off as a Mission-based game, where you start from zero resources each mission but there's meta progression such as unlocking new technologies, talent trees, and special gear you can take with you down onto the planet.

A neat idea honestly, but an unpopular one, and so Outpost mode, and more importantly an Open World mode were added to the game. Open World has essentially become the default mode in Icarus, with 99% of the missions in the game now playable in Open World as Operations, and new content being designed for it explicitly. I'll admit, some of the conversions from Missions to Operations are not handled as well as others. Especially a couple having weird arbitrary requirements that made sense in the more restricted scope of a mission but are bizarre to encounter in Open World, such as an Operation wanting you to grow crops but requiring you to build the crop plots in a very specific area instead of wherever you've placed your base.

Despite that, there's something special about Icarus that keeps me playing it. A big part of it for me is the progression in "power" as you gain talents and higher tiers of technology is handled really well, as you go from rationing precious commodities and barely surviving against a single bear to hoarding entire cupboards full of of high end materials and slaughtering absurd hordes of apex predators while a blizzard rages on. You get to experience your flimsy thatch base catching fire when you placed a campfire indoors or get hit by lightning and then upgrading to stone, which can survive many of the storms that tore your wooden home to shreds, only to eventually further upgrade to concrete and fully withstand even the most severe weather events.

It's a game you won't really know if it's for you until you try it and see if it clicks, and if it does you're gonna lose a lot of time to it.

Post-Patch 1.1:

They do seem to have begun to properly fix/implement A-Life with this update which I'm very relieved about. It's still not exactly in a state where I would recommend the game but it's definitely feeling like an actual STALKER game now.

Also the game is pretty fun now that enemies don't spawn on top of me regularly. Another A-Life update on par with this one and I would be a lot more comfortable re-reviewing and recommending the game. I only wish the game had launched in a better state.

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Original Launch Review:

They made a Far Cry game instead of a STALKER game. It just feels like a cash grab using the STALKER IP with no soul or passion put into it, especially when you read interviews and realize A-Life 2.0 was never intended to work like Call of Pripyat's A-Life.

Unless they fundamentally rework the entire system, the patches they claim will fix things won't actually do anything to solve the root issue that the zone feels completely dead outside of a bubble surrounding the player.

A-Life was always an illusion of a living world but they didn't even bother maintaining that illusion in STALKER 2. Maybe I'm wrong and A-Life really is just bugged but I don't understand how something like that could make it past QA and into the full release.

put 40 hrs into the playtest before writing this review and its definitely worthy of being called a successor to Elona

edit: its still really good

the devs would much rather spend time and resources on making an insane amount of DLC than making their game better or having actual controller support

hardcoding marriage to be exclusively heterosexual so that modders cant even add same-sex marriage is really weird, man

$30 early access game decided to add a F2P-style cash shop before even hitting 1.0, good job!

one of the most frustrating sequels to a game i love that i've ever played. the combat was improved but they reduced the amount of skills you can equip which made every fight feel samey and heavily nerfed mages and sorcerers. the map is bigger but there's almost zero enemy variety, and even worse, barely any new enemies from DD1. not to mention the fact that there is almost ZERO reward for exploration. the vast majority of your gear will come from shops, you're not gonna be finding any cool armor or weapons in caves and dungeons. you're just gonna find the exact same crap.

despite the lack of enemy variety, the game throws hundreds and hundreds of enemies at you any time you go anywhere which is even more frustrating because by the time you get 20-ish hours into the game, there is absolutely zero difficulty left aside from fighting a dragon (maybe). its just a slog to go through a thousand identical and impotent goblins every time you need to travel somewhere.

dragons dogma 1 was unfinished but it was understandable considering the circumstances. dragons dogma 2, which had more time and budget, should not have felt like 30% of a game stretched out across 60-80 hours.