Recent reviews by Nosferatu

It's true, it's just Hades but more and better. I highly recommend this one with very few criticisms.

10/10. No notes.
I think the fated list is too granular, and should be more focused on choices the player takes going into a run rather than choices based on chance within a run. If you're trying to 100% like I am, you'll come to hate that stupid little parchment icon when it starts derailing your runs - lest you have to wait 10 more runs for the option to proc again.

11/10. 🔥.
The video compression is crunchy. Many moving elements of the game are actually videos, not just the fullscreen clips, and the compression artifacts can be annoying. They should really just export the same videos at a higher bitrate and make it a free optional DLC, as some other games do.

9/10. My main attraction to every entry from Supergiant Games.

I'm a huge Supergiant Games fanboy, mainly due to Darren Korb's score and Ashley Barrett's vocals. I listen to the soundtracks all the time, most of all the orchestral album Songs of Supergiant Games, Bastion, and Transistor, all of which are very focused on shorter experiences.

Hades' soundtrack was still good for listening outside the game, but most tracks felt more focused on being good videogame music rather than being good music , serving the gameplay rather than being the main attraction. It did succeeded in that way, but that's why I haven't listened to it as frequently.

I am about the furthest you could be from a musical expert, but I feel the music of Hades II is more varied and prominently featured, and it satisfies my tastes more. I haven't listened to the soundtrack outside the game yet, as I am waiting until I 100% the game. But by my memory, there are more tracks throughout this game that seize my attention during gameplay than the original.

Without spoiling anything, I've enjoyed the journey, and the main ending is fine. I somewhat prefer the story of the first game, but there's no gulf in quality between them. Unless you typically skip through all dialogue, I definitely recommend playing the first game before this one.

These are arguably not even spoilers, but I'm tagging it for those people want to go into the story absolutely blind:
The epilogue somewhat went the way I expected the main ending to go, but waaaaaay too stretched out. The revelations in the epilogue confirm what was hinted throughout the story, but it would have been much more impactful if they were a more prominent part of the main ending.

My bigger complaint is that the epilogue and side content with character relationships slows to a crawl after the main ending. That's fine if you're not ready to stop playing, but once you've done 100 runs and the side content is still advancing one small conversation per run, you'll be ready for it to wrap up. I think this is just a byproduct of being developed in Early Access, as those players received these events in smaller batches and wouldn't have had as much to do each update.

Play Hades II, but play Hades first if you care at all about story content. The gameplay, art, and music are phenomenal as usual. Be prepared to do many, many runs if you go for 100% completion.

I'd give it a neutral review if I could, but given the choices, I wouldn't say I recommend it. It is cheap, but I'm not sure it's worth anyone's time at this point.

The game is made in Source, and it shows. The gameplay is basically the gunplay from Half-Life 2 (which I don't really think was one of HL2's strengths) minus the variety and physics puzzles, and the levels are much more on-rails. Yet despite the narrower focus, I would still say the gameplay is much less polished than Half-Life 2.

Also some enemies are a little damage-spongey, especially the final boss. It doesn't bother some people so much, but I hate that in shooters.

I haven't played the original SiN, so I have no nostalgia for the franchise. The story is schlocky, but it has a certain charm. Thematically, I can see how this would have been somewhat popular during its time.

If a very short on-rails action-hero Half-Life 2 campaign mod without the physics puzzles sounds good to you, yeah you'll probably like it. Obviously some people enjoy what this is, but I think there's many much better options today.

This game made me dread gaming. It's monotonous, it's a second job, and it doesn't respect your time. I wanted to see this through for the overarching story of the franchise, but I temporarily quit this one multiple times over the past year and a half before I could make myself complete it.

I have complaints about this game as both an Assassin's Creed game and as a game in general, so I will split them up for those who don't care about the franchise identity.

Eivor's Assassin storyline is secondary to the main quest, but is needed for the full ending of the game. Similar to Kassandra in Odyssey, Eivor is allied with Assassins (Hidden Ones), but is not a devotee. It's a slight improvement over Odyssey having virtually nothing to do with Assassins, but it still feels more like a very different franchise crossing over with Assassin's Creed.

Some cool things happen to advance the modern day story, and there are some course-corrections that I generally approve of. However, the few things that do happen are locked behind the very end of the game. If you're into the Assassin's Creed overall storyline but are not interested Eivor's story, I would recommend just skipping this game and watching an ending compilation.

Stealth assassination is still not a one-hit kill for many enemies until you progress through the skill tree and grind for equipment upgrades, disincentivizing the hallmark gameplay style of an Assassin's Creed game. Stealth is often an option, but it is usually only viable for missions focused on stealing something or for entering open combat with an advantage. And given the setting, there is little verticality and sparse cover, leaving few options for stealthily killing some enemies.

The main combat is still the same watered down "we have Dark Souls at home" formula used since Origins, complete with oversized health bars. I understand there is a big market for souls-likes, but it's always been a poor fit for these games.

The grind is certainly incentivized by Ubisoft selling grind-skipping gear, but to their credit, they did at least add in the same customizable difficulty options from Origins and Odyssey. You can turn on one-hit kill assassinations and change damage values in these settings, making it a little more like the old games. The game is certainly not balanced around this, but it wasn't very balanced in the first place.

It was fun overall for the first 10 hours or so, but almost every aspect of this game overstays its welcome. Poor dialogue with very basic animation always go on far too long. And for every one quest required in the main questline, you could cut one, possibly two mediocre filler quests entirely. The story deserves maybe 20-30 hours, but it's padded out to over 100 hours.

The main combat AI is piss-poor and buggy. NPCs are very dumb, and the developers compensate by making most enemies damage sponges.

The combat behavior in battles and sieges is even worse. Every major battle is maxed out at maybe 30 NPCs total - paired up, spread out over a field, and taking turns swinging swords at each other. It looks straight out of Knights of the Old Republic. NPC numbers are sustained by respawning the dead as soon as you turn your back.

This is some real buggy ♥♥♥♥. I experienced lots of crashes, which became more frequent the further I went.

AI pathing is borked, as usual. NPCs will just wander in front of characters during cutscenes, walk on top of set pieces, or fall off of surfaces. Sometimes it's funny, like when no one acknowledges a random NPC walking off a dock and falling into the water in a cutscene. But it gets old quick.

I also would often become softlocked where certain quest items weren't interactable, puzzles were broken, or scripted events didn't start. Usually restarting the game would resolve the issue, but it often wasn't clear if the game was broken or if you just didn't see the solution or path forward.

The only people I can mildly recommend this to are casually interested players who want a Viking action game and don't care about playing until the end. And that's just because there's basically nothing else fitting this criteria.

Otherwise, I strongly recommend not playing this. If you're invested in the Assassin's Creed lore, just go watch a cutscene compilation on YouTube. If you want an open world melee/bow action game, there's plenty of better options than this. And if you just want a good Norse mythology game, God of War 4 and Ragnarök did it much better.

Fun game and a great dynamic soundtrack.

It's all jazz on drums, reactive to your actions in the game, though parts of each track are scripted at different points in the level or just waiting on certain actions from the player to cue. It allowed each track to retain a distinct identity, yet still be the most reactive music in any game in my memory.

I also dig the visual style, but I don't have much to say since you'll know whether you like it from the screenshots and trailers. It stays very consistent throughout.

The main levels get difficult but are all still very doable on the default difficulty. The difficulty of the break in level got out of hand, but I really shouldn't hold it against the game because it's a bonus level.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it was my favorite of the DLCs, but I would describe it as more of an amusement ride. There's only one path here, though the order of some of the segments is the player's choice. The focus here is definitely on telling a fun time travel and multiversal story, and a little hunting for clues is included to keep the player engaged. I don't have any complaints about the interactivity, largely because this is the only DLC like this and the result was very fun.

Unrelated, but I was grinning ear to ear throughout the musical sequence.

I enjoyed this one more than Live & Spooky but less than The Timeloop. They changed the structure to push you to seek every ending, and the repeated segments dragged upon later runs. The often requested fast forward feature would help here.

I didn't care for it nearly as much as the base game, and it's definitely the weakest of the DLCs, but it's still pretty good.

It's not only my favorite FMV game I've played, but the most innovative gameplay idea I've seen in recent years - influencing a national narrative with the power of the edit, expressing your choices primarily through control of a TV news multi-cam system. It helps that this is a weird dream job for me, but the excellence of the game stands on its own.

Beyond the gameplay, the degree to which your choices affect the branching narrative is impressive considering how complicated the planning and writing would have to be, not to mention the many hours of FMV sequences filmed with long takes, more closely resembling a stage play than TV. It's a breath of fresh air following a trend of games with budgets many times higher offering only false choices leading to, at best, a binary selection of endings or, at worst, no effect on the story at all.

The only complaints I've seen about the story seem to be from people angry about the perceived representation of their political ideology. Light spoilers on the politics, if those comments are dissuading you:
If it's not abundantly obvious from the store page, the totalitarian party in the marketing is far-left. There are figures generally on the side of this party that support them to varying degrees. The opposition groups similarly are not represented as one monolith. There are centrist figures, pro-business figures, etc. However, there is a far-right group who pushes the hardest and loudest. Both the totalitarian far-left regime and the far-right revolutionary group seem to be the lightning rods for the online complaints.

Having seen every ending, I'd say the writers have somewhat of a centrist take, but it's more about the ideologues' inflexibility leading to great suffering. The content of this game should not offend anyone but the staunchest tankies or anarcho-capitalists.

All in all, I highly recommend this one. I can't wait to see NotGames' next project.

It's a fun little platformer with a neat gimmick, and it doesn't drag it out. It'd be cool to see this as the defining feature of one region in a bigger platformer.

I couldn't make it through this one. The story is far less compelling than the first game and Infinite, and it is plagued with frequent crashes. And every time it crashed, I had no interest in replaying the levels I didn't like the first time around.

I also won't weigh in on the legitimacy of this game as a sequel, but I will say it's disconnected from the two main BioShock games. But if you want to know the story of 2 for completionism, I'd just watch an abridged playthrough on YouTube.