Recent reviews by Xeredek

Nothing says the future of professional gaming more than Node Graph out of Date. Rebuilding.
I am appalled at how poorly this runs, for how it looks.
I have a perfectly reasonably powerful PC- Rhadeon 6800 with a Ryzen 5 7600x, with 32 gigs of ram. I can run every other game in my library at max settings comfortably, many of which simply look far better than this demo does anyway. I've heard that these RTX demos are deliberately compromised on AMD and I believe it.
Turn off enhanced models and the flashlight stops working, turn off enhanced materials and suddenly it's daytime.

There is a certain sort of gamer out there, for some reason, that feels the need to defend gimmicky stuff like ray tracing that these companies try to force on us, when other folks point out that it just doesn't actually look that much better for such a high performance cost. This demo basically just looks like an unreal engine game, with a weird fog effect applied to it's light sources. Complete with the world disintegrating before your eyes and plastic-y-ness of all the materials of course, so that you can't actually enjoy all that supposedly amazing detail anyway. Framerate aside, it is unplayable largely because of how ugly it is aesthetically to me.

Personally, a major killer is how randomly Matte the 357 looks. In the OG game, a very simple texture blending trick is used to create a really rather convincing illusion of reflection on it's chrome finish.
It's a very old 3D trick, the same used frequently all the way back in the late 90s like many games on the N64 for instance: think metal Mario, Link's sword in OOT, or the metal doors in perfect dark, or paint reflections in many classic racing games. Oddly enough It's also present in HL1 in a few standout places, though I would hesitantly add it wasn't actually well used there honestly.
Anyway, the trick cost almost literally nothing to produce, and still honestly looks pretty alright today. Comparing that with this demo and, I don't know it if was just straight up broken for me for me or something, but the 357 straight up just isn't reflective at all even when I force absolute max settings.
I assume this is the best Nvidia can do with the tech, given how it's basically an Advertisement.
Processing power aside, "real"-ness of your fake lighting system aside, If your amazing new lighting engine cannot do what the engine of SM64 could apparently do better on an console that was only pretending to be 64 bit, I'm sorry but it's just bad lighting. It's sooo much worse though when actually considering the absurd performance cost in comparison though!

This isn't to say that ray traced lighting like as a technology is completely worthless or anything, I'm not certain but I believe one of my favorite games- Teardown- makes heavy use of ray tracing for it's lighting to great effect. In the right hands it's OK. Teardown is very stylized though, and uses the shortcomings of the lighting method to it's advantage. It also runs beautifully for me so that's more evidence for the compromised AMD performance claims.
What I take issue with is Nvidia pushing for this lighting system in everything, no matter how Ill-fitting, purely to justify more demand in graphics cards none of us can afford anyway. This is backwards, what actual game developers typically do is work out a desired look for their game, then simply select the best rendering style from the ones available, and usually the one with the least overhead for the desired look. Ray tracing still isn't selected often, and I think that speaks for itself.

All in all, this is just an advert for graphics cards that Nvidia already sold out to AI companies like palantir lol.
There sure are a lot more reason than just these silly RTX demos to hate Nvidia, which is part of why I'm inclined to be so harsh in the first place, but as somebody who has deeply loved this medium for nearly their entire life- the complete misunderstanding of the artistry of videogames often on display in these demos is mind boggling.
And Nvidia, if you somehow thought that deliberately breaking your demos for AMD cards would convince consumers come back to your business? Well, then you understand people far less than even video game rendering.

I wish steam gave a mixed option for reviews for this game more than any other.
1,500 hours!
This is a deeply flawed game in a great many respects, that was made unethically in many more respects as well, I have never felt right giving it a positive review.
1,500 hours though, kind of hard to ignore that kind of number.
There have been other games to take up as much of my life for sure, but as far as games I've played through steam alone- I think this is my actually most played title...
And I do genuinely cherish a lot of that time over the years, despite the absurd mismanagement this game was subject to, and I do really love this game, walking disaster that it is.

Starbound is essentially a "terraria-like", a Voxel based 2d building and adventuring game. But, Instead of there being one worldspace, you have an immense galaxy of worlds, where you can travel to a huge variety of planets to gather resources and gear, clear dungeons, visit (or build!) villages, hire a crew, see wild sights and generally be a menace. It has rather deep and interesting worldbuilding at times, and character creation is interesting too where you can select from a list of alien species to play as, inviting great roleplay opportunities.
These things combined make Starbound a pretty special experience, where you can really get into a character and the world. It can be an incredibly immersive experience, which pairs magically with the ability to build towns and space stations just about anywhere you want. It's an incredibly rare variety of game in that respect: the elusive immersive sandbox.

Starbound had an extraordinarily messy development though. There was a revolving door of largely unpaid underage interns, and the folks in charge of the project basically didn't care what was being added so long as there were things *being added* from said unpaid staff. Half baked generated NPC quests, shallow pointless writing and terrible padded main storyline (missing the unique starts that the playable races were *supposed* to have), messy inconsistent tone of added content, dull dungeons with obvious favor given to one theme or another depending on what dev was working that week. Lazy design decisions like making all notable locations separate from the generated universe, as opposed to actually using that amazing *space mechanic* in their *space game*. Mountains of odd one-off dead-end mechanics that were clearly short lived pet projects (looking at you archaology) and so on and so forth. Nearly every aspect of Starbound feels *off* in some way, and it really adds up. Not to mention the cartoonishly villainous approach to development chucklefish had in the first place, which might be a very understandable reason not to buy the game at all. I play this game because I've owned it since beta, since before that ♥♥♥♥ even happened let alone anyone knowing about it, but if you abstain giving these people money, well- good on you, honestly.

Starbound is a game that fundamentally has incredible potential. It's very unique, and does things well that almost no other game *can* do. But it's also at war with itself in terms of design, ambition, writing, aesthetics and you will be absolutely modding it to get anything close to it's full potential, and as ever mods can only fix so much.
Though, the community has certainly gone far. An optional main story mod, for instance, is almost required for an even remotely tolerable experience, but the mods the community have made go far beyond what is required. It is once again the unpaid labor that make this game what it is.
New planetary biomes, dungeons and custom races that put the vanilla content to shame, awesome weapons, new building blocks and furniture, vehicles and even the ability to build your ship from blocks instead of the vanilla prefab system. Modders truly do what Chucklefish couldn't be bothered with. It's even recieved the OpenMW treatment with the incredible OpenStarbound project, which is a remarkable effort from a game community at the best of times, and really shows how deeply people do care about this broken janky mess.

So yeah, it's one of those games. An awesome one-of-a-kind experience, that will have you groaning out loud in real life on occasion. A frustratingly stupid mess, that will give you gaming memories that will stick with you for years afterwords. It's one of those, we've all got one. this is one of mine.

just go play Terraria, man.

An awesome little game that I found very compelling! The unusual control scheme is used to great effect, and without spoiling any details, it creates some very novel gameplay moments totally unlike anything I've experienced in any other title.
Caput Mortum takes heavy inspiration from actual old Alchemical practices, so if you have an interest in either the history of the sciences or medieval history in general there will be many moments that have you smiling ear to ear, or at least that was the effect they had on me.
This game feels almost like an adaptation of what Tycho Brahe's subjects must have surely thought he was up to in Uraniborg, when they raised his laboratory to the ground.

It's a shorter title. I got through it in a little less than four hours, but it feels incredibly dense with no moments of filler. Every new puzzle or monster or atmosphere feels novel and meaningful as an inclusion, and I can see myself replaying it in the future simply to experience it's quality and unique gameplay again. If anything about this one seems interesting to you, give it a shot.

A really great game- know what it is going into it though.
It's mostly a really good linear story set in a fairly "empty" feeling beautifully crafted open world.
It's a very impressive recreation of 1940s LA, but there's basically no side content at all- the game uses this backdrop in the same way old Noire films used like on-location filming back in the day. This is a highly immersive, well written, basically linear game. Very good and worth your time! but you'll have no fun if you're expecting some kind of nifty 50s GTA or something.
it's a playable Noire film.

DO NOT BUY IT HERE! You cant even download the steam version anymore (annoyingly).
It's a great game! but get the open source version online

The simple joy of having such a complete simulation of a vehicle's operation is hard to put into words. If you're the kind of person who is compelled by seeing what a machine is capable of, then you're who this game was made for.

It doesn't matter if you can fix broken ass bethesda games with mods, I guess. Bethesda will just break those mods too. awesome. What wonderful timing, Bethesda, really. Show all these new fans what you're really made of.

EDIT: although the sony account situation was resolved in my country of residence, it remains and issue in others. There are several places in the world where people have bought this game, and cannot make a sony account where they live, and now cannot play it. For that reason, my negative outlook on this situation still stands. I will revise this review to be the positive review the game itself deserves if this is ever actually *fully* resolved.

Sony, you f*cking suck.
Here is a game sincerely loved by fans and is clearly a labor of love from it's developers and you see this sincerely cool thing as nothing more than an opportunity to leverage your horrifically insecure corporate account system onto people. I have friends who have hundreds of hours into the game that uninstalled it today because your security is so famously untrustworthy, and getting forced into your system felt so gross.
Everyone can see through your bullsh*t from miles away, if you actually gave a damn about security you wopld lean on STEAM for PC like you had been already, not your own trash.

This sucks for the folks at arrowhead the most, who are having their hard work twisted into a tool of corporate control after clearly pouring their hearts into this title. This is, literally speaking, why we cannot have nice things. I just makes my heart sink knowing that such an earnest effort can be kicked and twisted like this by a bunch of corporate worms.
Go f*ck yourselves sony executives.

An absolute treat.
The best airship fighting system I've seen, coupled with one of the most versatile building systems I've ever seen, all in the structure of a pretty legit strategy game- or simple sandbox battles if you'd prefer.
Don't sleep on this one, it's one of those special "one of a kind" kinds of games.

I run in circles in maps and spawn stuff in and things explode and it's fun

I've managed to do this for 800 hours so far