Recent reviews by AssMan69

I am a 46 year old father, probably one of the oldest people playing this game. I am a single father to my son who is 19 now. My son got this game for Christmas from his uncle in 2024 so we installed it on his computer and started playing. My brother never normally buys my son gifts but this one was a 'thank you' for something that happened on their camping trip last year.

By the end of the week my son had 23 hours in this game. This was horrible for me as it was already hard for me to find ways to spend time with my son since he's been so quiet since the camping trip. I decided to make a Steam account and get this game to see if I could maybe play alongside him. I loaded into the game, chose my character and started playing but I was stuck on what I was supposed to do. I asked my son for help and he hosted a game for me to join. I loved it as it was the best time I had spent with my son since my wife had died.

This game has brought me and my son closer together again and now we actually spend time together outside the house as well. I have tried to see if he would like to go camping with me but when I brought it up as something nice to do my son just sobbed into his pillow.

This game reminded me that there's fun to be had in everything and it has brought me and my son so many happy memories.

Thank you.

‘Everything here is guaranteed to injure, maim, or kill at your discretion. Except me. I only kill when I want to.’
- KL-E-0

After apparently spending 247 hours and 1 minute playing this on the Xbox One, I had some reservations about my ability to jump back into Fallout 4 and not only enjoy it, but to persevere long enough to 100% the achievements.

I need not have worried, as my playtime may suggest.

From Concord to Quincy, every square foot feels like it has a story to tell and the atmosphere to prove it. You can feel the love put into every shack, bombed-out apartment complex, and flooded metro tunnel. Every single location has something going on (and your efforts to shine the proverbial torch on each one almost always feels rewarded).

That said, Fallout 4 absolutely has all the hallmarks and "features" of a janky Bethesda title (and the writing is no exception).

If you try and role-play Fallout 4, you’re going to have a rough time with the mental gymnastics needed to suspend the disbelief that the main story doesn’t exist. If you play as Nate (or Nora), as was seemingly intended, and don’t attempt to impose a personality on what is clearly not a blank slate, then I think you’ll have a much better time on your journey across the Commonwealth.

And what a journey it was. I’m not sure I’ve put this much time into a game since Skyrim.

Sure, Preset Gravy and his settlements are kind of tormenting, you can’t romance the dog, and the Brotherhood weren’t nearly as xenophobic as I’d have liked. But, for the price-to-content ratio, for me, it’s an easy 10/10.

Fallout 4 is a brilliant, content-rich, open world, exploration oriented looter-shooter; but it’s a bad RPG. So don’t treat it like one.

A long time ago, Christmas of 2010 (I believe), my mum purchased Red Dead Redemption and a second-hand Xbox 360 for me at a car boot sale. This was an apparently shameful expense for her to justify spending, and so I was told to tell people (should they ask) that it cost her only £40.

What it actually cost, I’m not sure.

By the next Christmas, the house had been repossessed, and we began the process of packing our lives into cardboard boxes whilst awaiting the purgatory of an emergency shelter. One of the last rooms packed was my mum’s, and, whilst doing so, she uncovered two gifts she had misplaced before Christmas; Halo: Reach, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Though all three of these games were voraciously played to a point far beyond the natural lifespans of their available content (even without the internet to access Xbox Live, I still managed to grind my Spartan through the notorious Warrant Officer ranks and beyond), Skyrim was the one that seemed to totally captivate a desire within me to immerse myself in the world held within its little silver disk. I wanted to experience everything it had to offer.

In early 2013, we were moved from the shelter to a council house, where, for the first time, we got at-home internet access. This opened me up to a world of Skyrim YouTubers playing on PC, with mods, and (after all the hours I’d already spent playing Skyrim) I wanted to emulate what I was seeing. I did this by enforcing certain “immersive limitations” on my playthroughs by doing things like: regularly sleeping and eating, restricting the use of potions, forbidding the use of fast travel, and refraining from treating my hirelings like begrudged bipedal pack animals.

I’m convinced I eventually spent somewhere north of a thousand hours wandering, and exploring, and experiencing everything from the deep autumnal birch forests of The Rift to the edges of Haafingar’s desolate tundratic coast. I was totally and utterly enthralled by the depth of it all.

During all of this, the things in our life that were bad only seemed to ceaslessly creep towards ‘worse’, yet Skyrim managed to occupy and distract my mind enough to help float me through a time so low in my life that I almost can’t recall it. I’m not saying Skyrim fixed a broken 14-year-old’s life; however, I reckon it did help him find a bit of solace at a time when his home life was really not so great.

For me, Skyrim was a dense, content-rich world with so much in it to discover. It’s one of a small number of truly unique games I wish I could forget all about, should it allow me to experience it, once again, for the very first time.

I hope that one day I’ll return.

‘Do your gods answer your prayers, Senua?’

This game would have been wack if Senua got medicated, but, thankfully, she must only have access to an understaffed, overburdened, GP practice located in South East England that is seemingly only capable of forwarding her a referral to the already sizeable CBT waitlist when "first instance" mental health crises present themselves.

Having now waited several weeks for this referral email, our 8th century Pictish Waifu (I can fix her, I promise) has decided the better course of action is to take the putrefying head of her expired lover, murdered by Norsemen, to Helheim, where she hopes to save his soul from the Germanic Gods he was sacrificed to.

In a run of good luck for us, her worsening psychotic episodes combined with the extended NHS backlog will allow us enough time to experience the upcoming sequel before she either gets the help she needs or comes so close to committing toaster-bath that they finally fast track her towards actual, meaningful, help.

It’s a short story, no more than 7 or 8 hours (with a little extra on top for that 100%, dopamine-injecting, achievement hunt needed to sustain the impression that I’m extracting optimal value from the games on my Steam library).

Lastly, many reviews express ambivalence or outright displeasure towards the combat and the puzzles. Personally, I never found them to be a drag. Both provided just enough challenge to squirt moderate amounts of various neurochemicals into my little rat brain once I’d overcome them.

As it goes for many of us, Senua’s greatest battles reside within her. This story is what you should stay to experience.