Recent reviews by (Assorted Noises)

Sweeping the game awards babyyyyy

It's really, REALLY good. Graphical fidelity makes this a beautiful rendition of the game that introduced me to open world RPGs years ago. Menus, accessibility, and all manner of other bits and bobs are vastly improved; a very welcome change given that the original, like New Vegas, can be tricky to run at times.

They also left the character creation alone completely, so you can make horrors beyond reckoning.

10/10!

I just came here to say the following:

Good game that tends to run poorly on modern hardware, similar to New Vegas.

Also...

THE REMAKE IS REAL.

It's hard to put words on this - it just isn't appealing. Not on its' own, and certainly not compared to the original. Aiden is surprisingly bland as a protag, and the overarching motivations that drive him aren't that compelling when measured against Crane. I gave it a fair shake, but I cant recommend the game when its' progenitor is cheaper and more fun. Maybe this would be worth picking up at a discount, something like $35 tops.

It's Dark Souls, what more could you ask for?




Except maybe Bloodborne on PC

This game kept shattering my heart and then gluing the pieces back together, only to repeat the cycle several times over. 10/10, would experience trauma again

I may come back to this one at some point, but it's times like this that I really wish Steam had a "meh?" category for reviews. Since there isn't, this review will be more of a qualified no.

The game has most of the fundamentals of a typical open world offering; collectibles, POIs, questgivers, unlockables etc.. and the game world is coherent in both design and tone. Japan is a nation of duality between new and old, with ancient temples being situated in the midst of massive technologically advanced cities - a perfect place to examine themes of modernity intermingling and often clashing with more fundamentally human ideas of the spirit. This is most obviously seen in the enemies you can encounter in the game, but one might also be forgiven for perceiving those enemies as being stereotypes of Japanese culture (schoolgirl enemies that skip, and dreary "salaryman" enemies who advance whilst holding umbrellas).

The gameplay is decent. The action centers primarily on the use of elemental abilities which grow in number and strength over time as part of typical RPG fare. These abilities are used to fight off enemies such as those mentioned above, as well as in the traversal of the city itself. The controls are...ok. The use of abilities somehow feels unsatisfying to me, and the jumping mechanics are a tad jankier than I can forgive for a game with this much verticality.

My biggest complaint is that the characters are.... boring. For me, if an open world has dialogue in it, either the protagonist or NPCs have to be interesting. Since there are next to no NPCs in Ghostwire for plot reasons you would imagine the protag would be interesting, but he isn't. His motivation is thematically solid, but overplayed. This is somewhat offset by his, uh, "companion" being sardonic, witty and complicated, but not enough for me to remain engaged with him.

I really wish the game was... more interesting? 2.5 hrs at time of review is obviously not much, but if a game hasn't incentivized my continued attention within 2hrs then that's a major red flag for me. So, my verdict at this time is that your should either wait for a robust discount or pass on this one unless you're slightly more than casually interested in Japanese lore.

I'd like to preface this by telling you that I'm a huge Bethesda RPG fan; across Skyrim's various iterations I've clocked something like 4k hours, for example.

This game is, above all else, missable. Nothing new is being done here, no risks taken. The only thing that might be considered a "risk" is the whole "1000 planets" thing; the only problem is that this is a quantity vs. quality issue. Plenty of places to go, not much to see. There is little to no incentive to exploring such a vast game world when POIs are relatively sparse. The cities here are somewhat interesting, but there are only a handful of them. The idea that the game takes place very shortly after humanity went out into the stars is an ineffective argument to justify the sparseness of settlements.

The characters are bland, as far as a modern RPG goes. Mass Effect 1-3 remain effective bars for high quality spacefaring RPGs with interesting and varied characters; the companions here fall far short of this, and their doing so has nothing to do with them all being human. Andreja and Barrett are the only ones I found intriguing, and Barrett only because he's funny. The general NPCs are even worse; unless they're a quest giver, there is usually no personality present. Beyond that, NPC models seem to vary in appearance from "generic person" all the way to "clay homunculus with horrifying, unblinking eyes".

Ship combat is a tad clunky, but passable. This is not a sim, so it feels arcadey and for that reason shouldn't be compared to other games that center on ship-ship combat. On a plus side, shipbuilding is fun, despite a clunky interface.

Gunplay is better than any of the Fallout games... although that's a bit of a sore spot even among diehard fans. It's still clunky.


Overall, I can only recommend this for huge Bethesda fans with a great deal of patience. That, with the caveat that even those individuals should wait for a deep discount. I don't feel I can recommend this to a general audience, as they are less likely to be tolerant of the game's shortcomings.

A casestudy in mediocrity from a company that knows better. I would consider playing another game set in this universe, but only if Bethesda ACTUALLY listens to fans' critiques.

This is a complicated recommendation, so bear with me.


Spiritfarer teaches an important lesson in that death, while not something to be rushed toward, is preferable to lingering too long. Saying goodbye is the price of living, and each moment spent together should ideally be cherished.

The gameplay itself is terribly repetitive, however. The game honestly could have encompassed 5 characters and been fine, so long as they were more fleshed out. The constant fetch quests were just a bit too much to bear for my attention span, so I believe I may seek out a playthrough on YouTube. I still wholeheartedly encourage everyone to consider trying this game, particularly if you're having trouble managing a recent loss.

It's just... good? Like really good?

Not much I can say that hasn't already been said, so I'll just say this: money talks. Support devs like this, who create enjoyable content and don't charge an arm and a leg for it.