Recent reviews by Rusty

I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this massive game world.

When ESO was first released, I thought I was disappointed. What I wanted was a new Skyrim, but instead ESO is kind of a generic MMO with an Elder Scrolls skin on it.

A couple years later I've had the itch to try some MMO. I feel like I'm way too late to WoW, so that's not happening. Final Fantasy XIV looks like it might be good, but I refuse to pay a subscription. The way content gets deleted from Destiny 2 is ridiculous. So by method of elimination I am left with ESO. It's cheap enough for the base game, so I thought why not give it a try?

I'm glad I tried it out because it scratches that MMO itch perfectly. But, it's not a game that I enjoyed immediately, but it took a while to grow on me. The starting area kind of sucks (the jail breakout + Auridon + main story is all kind of boring). Combat is a bit floaty, but still ok, but not great. The UI is overwhelming and takes a while to get used too. The game starts getting good, when you start exploring more and get to see new parts of the Elder Scrolls world. Reading some of the lore on the unofficial ESO wiki also helps understand the world better. I like the other zones I've explored so far, like Grahtwood and Daggerfall. I liked the stuff with Apocrypha (the Oblivion realm of knowledge and fate). There's a quest that introduces you to it and there's a wave based co-op dungeon survival mode. Group dungoens are decent fun to run around and fight stuff with other players. The grind seems kind of pointless to me because everything scales anyway. It's just numbers going up. The "Golden Pursuits" (challenges) give you some much needed purpose and direction in the game. "Tomes" are like a battlepass. By doing those you unlock a lot of stuff, including some currency ("Seals") for better pets and mounts.

My point is, there is a lot to do and enjoy with just the base game. If you play to explore the world and try out the various in-game activities, it's easy to ignore the grind. There's a lot to see and do. It's fun to see other players running around, going about their business and sometimes teaming up for a dungeon run. I recommend it overall, even if it has it's flaws. With all the content in the game, the real challenge is finding out how you like to play it.

Excellent immersion and atmosphere. You fight the clankers. The sound design is the best I've ever heard in a game. The game looks great and runs perfectly smooth for me with some tweaked settings. With the base game, you get to unlock a lot of skins etc. just by playing and you can completely ignore the skin shop. The monetization is fair and it feels like the devs respect the player.

As far as looter shooters go, I've found players are relatively peaceful, as long as you watch your back and don't jumpscare anyone. I would say 9/10 players will not shoot on sight which is suprisingly good. There are some amazing possibilities for emergent gameplay in Arc Raiders. For example you may hear some fighting in the distance, you carefully approach to check it out and see that another raider is struggling against a group of bots. You help by picking off the weak ones, then together you battle the big one. The other raider goes down in the fight, but you revive him and extract together.

I think Arc Raiders is currently the best looter shooter.

The most important thing is that the skating feels good in this game. You start with only a few tricks and get more as you keep playing.

Not everyone will like the weirdcore vibes and story (what are the moons? why am I trying to eat them?), but I think it's genius. The truth is no one cares about the story in a skateboarding game. Also most gamers, myself included, don't want to play a walking simulator art game. Skate Story unexpectedly combines skateboarding + artsy game and makes it feel like you are skateboarding through an abstract piece of art. After playing this, I know I will remember it much better than the story of any of the Tony Hawk or Skate games. "You are a demon, made of glass and pain and yet, you must skate." Unforgettable.

For the soundtrack I was expecting to hear more skatepunk, maybe some metal, but instead it's more synth tunes. At first I was disappointed by this, but there's something funny about having cozy synthpop music playing while you are shredding through a bleak underworld.

The game is a unique experience, and hell is apparently more enjoyable to me than the corporatized hellscape that is the new Skate game.

At 20$ this game is a steal and absolutely worth it.

It's Battlefield and there are more people playing than ever. There's things I could complain about like many of the other reviews, but I've got nothing to criticize that hasn't been said already. There's a Battlepass and some premium stuff, but you don't need any of that. I'm just glad there's a decent new Battlefield to play with full servers. There's a lot of game modes, I think anyone should be able to find a mode that they like, for me of course it's the classic Conquest mode with closed weapons. Custom games are already starting to get fun, for example there's a jet racing mode. There's a dozen other modes that I won't touch, so what? I just won't play them.

Overall, despite some flaws, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes multiplayer FPS games. There isn't anything quite like Battlefield with full servers.

Great co-op shooter. You can play the entire story mode in 3-player co-op, then there are extra missions where you get to see the story from the perspective of other marines who are affecting the main story in different ways. For example in the main story you see a Xeno hive blow up and you are just told "Some other squad did that", then after you play the main story, you get to play as that squad blowing up the hive. Such a cool idea.

Other good features:

- PvP mode, Reminds me a bit of gears of war or halo. Gameplay is a bit slower than most other shooters, but it has a satisfying heaviness to it. Everything hits like a sledgehammer. It's a nice change from all the adhd slide cancelling movement shooters we've seen recently.

- Crossplay, you can play with friends who are on Xbox or Playstation. It's a bit tricky to figure out:
press escape -> edit squad -> join menu -> share the join code with friend -> they enter the join code and show up in your game
Then enjoy the fun co-op.

- Customization, the menu UI is a bit confusing, but at the armory you can customize almost every piece of armor on your space marine in multiplayer.

- Lots of stuff to unlock in PvE: skins, skill trees across multiple classes and weapons that reward replaying missions on six different levels of difficulty.

One small issue I will mention is that in one game in PvP, I encountered a cheater who was blatantly one-shotting my entire team through walls, across the map. Annoying, but mostly I've had good games in PvP.

Overall, Space Marine 2 has a lot to offer and I find it's one of the best games of the last couple years. Especially if you liked older XBox 360 era games like Halo, Gears of War, COD Zombies, etc.

Praise the Emperor!

If you like retro games, this is amazing. You get 50 neat little games with this. It's like an entire alternate catalog of NES and SNES games. You can often tell what the games were inspired by, but everything has an original twist to it, there aren't really any boring clones.

When I first saw that this was the next game that the devs of Spelunky had made, I wasn't so sure about it, but now that I've played it, I've got to say that I'm impressed with what they did. It's 100% this meme:
"I want shorter games with worse graphics, made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding"

It's like rocket league, but with Fifa Street controls.

Games depend a lot on your team mates, like in any other team based online multiplayer.

Controls seem a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it, you will realize that the game gives you nice control over dribbling, passing and shooting. There is much less BS than in Fifa/eFootball. There's no p2w, only skins, so for this reason Rematch is already a much better game and the only thing I will play from now on, when I get the urge for some virtual football.

One major drawback to me is that the game doesn't have splitscreen or an offline mode against bots. It would be nice if those features could still be added later on.

It's like a big singleplayer CS surf map with bots. Fun movement shooter!

The bossfights were cool, but also a bit janky. Story is basically non-existant. There's a good variety of guns and it looks like the game can also be played in co-op with optional PvP. The Steam Workshop update for custom maps and the addition of a randomized rogue mode are nice for replayability.

Duck Game, but it's like an FPS from the early 2000s. Free, without bull$hit.

If you didn't play Duck Game, you should, but what this means is you have short battles that end quickly, you get points if you win. You play a couple rounds, then the map switches. Whoever reaches a certain amount of points wins.

The focus on 1v1 is a nice break from all the team-based multiplayer games we have now.
This puts the game in the unique spot of being the best 1v1 FPS game (tell me of a better one if you disagree).

CS 1.6 cursed style graphics are all you need for a fun multiplayer FPS.
The variety of maps is impressive; movement and gunplay is good.
If you're someone with little time, it's a perfect game for quick sessions.

The only problem is I get about 2 crashes every hour. I see it as a feature, so I don't play too much. I'm willing to overlook this fault, since it's a game made by just three guys.
(still fix the crashes)

If you like FPS games even a little bit, give this one a try. It's good fun.

It's janky, bland nonsense. Even as a f2p game it wasn't worth the couple of hours I spent on it.

Annoyances:
- You can't rebind all keys, even though some default keybinds suck
- You can't turn off chromatic aberration, a graphical effect that makes things blurry and adds a slight purple/bluish outline around most objects
- Random disconnects/lag on an otherwise stable internet connection
- Weird translations all over the place, wooden dialogue, or rather monologues since barely any characters talk to to each other, they just instruct you or lore dump, while your character nods. It's not even good cringe because it's so boring.
- This is what made me leave, when I found out: Servers reset when a new season starts and you lose your base and gear. Screw that. Please let me decide when I want to start a new game, don't just force delete saves.

The one good thing that the game showed me is that I should probably play Days Gone because cruising around a zombie apocalypse on a motorcycle is fun. But just directly ripping off that idea feels very lazy.

I only tried this because of the apparently large playerbase, but don't let that fool you. Many other co-op PvE games are better. I'd even rather play through L4D again for the millionth time.