Recent reviews by ao bing

Never really played anything like it. You have to use your sight, hearing, and feeling (controller rumble) quite a bit more than anything else I've ever played. Despite a good chunk of Hellblade being a "walking sim", Ninja Theory takes full advantage of the interactivity of games. Hellblade also takes risks. It splices gameplay with footage from real actors, breaks the fourth wall, and can be difficult to follow at points, but these decisions pay off handily. It leads to a product that is undoubtedly intriguing and, in a word, striking.

There are two negatives with Hellblade, but they are fairly negligible in my eyes. First is the jank, which is completely understandable and unimportant. This was made by an indie studio that needed to make every dollar count. They were unconcerned with the font of the end credits or the polish of the main menu screen, or how Senua jumps into the world when you load a save. The second is the combat which is... alright I suppose. It's definitely not bad. The animations are gorgeous and it was often thrilling. It's just nothing to write home about. It's unfortunate. But irrelevant. Hellblade exceeds in practically every other area. A stunted-feeling 3rd person hack-n-slash is totally and completely fine in a game like this, especially when it's as responsive as this.

Before I end the review, I want to appreciate how much this game respects player intelligence. It's a bit ridiculous how video games these days treat you. I often find myself feeling panicked to solve puzzles in one minute or so with modern AAA titles because some side character will explain the solution to me or there will be a huge, obnoxious piece of text giving a "hint" that's essentially just the solution. With old games, puzzles can feel impossible to solve without the internet. Hellblade offers puzzles with possibly the greatest mix of challenge and simplicity that I've experienced. They're just difficult enough so that I had to actually think critically, but not complicated enough to make them practically unsolvable without help. Perfection!

There are many more things I could say about Hellblade such as the wonderful plot, just how visually astounding it is, and the universally incredible performances. However, this review is long enough. I would recommend Hellblade to anyone.

9/10

My Specs: 3060 ti, 5600x, 32 GB DDR4 3600mhz, all overclocked and the game is installed on an HDD which I can't remember the RPM for. I played the game at 1440p on the medium preset.

4/25/23

Okay, so there is pretty much just one thing holding this port back: the performance. It makes no sense how this game looks worse and is more demanding than RDR2 when it's on medium and I play RDR2 on high. I thought my PC was going to explode trying to run RDR2 on high settings, but it exploded trying to run TLOU on medium settings with reflections turned to high.

For a general performance overview, I mostly got a fluctuating FPS between maybe 65-90 throughout the whole game. The 1% lows were really bad a lot of the time, but mostly it stayed only about 10 FPS below the average FPS. On demanding sections, it went down to around 40 and I don't remember it ever going up to 100. I could be wrong about that, though.

The medium preset is mostly fine. Mostly. There are a good amount of sections in this game where there's a crap-ton of water and so the low reflections look awful. I had to crank it up to high to make it look acceptable, but it dropped my FPS by 10-15. The character models can also look a little wonky when close-ups to their hands or hair are shown.

With all of these performance issues, I still enjoyed my time with this port. The controls are a little weird and needed some tweaking, but the default weapon selection thingy is so intuitive and fun to use once you get the hang of it a couple of hours in. I LOVED aiming with a mouse. I remember playing this on a tiny PS3 controller and sucking so bad, but it really is night and day what a mouse can do for video game combat.

Last thing I'll say is that I loved how much content they crammed into this. There are speedrun modes, filters, skins, director commentary, and more. It is SO cool. Because of all this, I would say this game is more than playable in its current state. It's enjoyable. That doesn't mean that the devs are done patching it, but rather that it really isn't as bad as it was on launch.

2005's Resident Evil 4 was a severe disappointment upon first playthrough. I had been introduced to the series with RE7 and RE1 Remake, so my expectation was a slow and methodical blood-pumping horror game that prioritizes spacial strategy and a creepy atmosphere. RE1 Remake encouraged the player not to kill enemies if one had the choice. RE7 mostly worked because of how terrifying it was, not because the mold guys were easy to shoot. RE4's entire point was shooting bad guys and getting from point A to point B in the straightest line possible with minimal horror.

After 50 or so hours (achievement hunting), I came to actually love the game. I found charm in its cheesy story. I learned that it did have an unsettling atmosphere after all. And yes, the shooting was *really* fun. It was an 8/10 or a 9/10 experience for me. Very important piece of art, but a bit antiquated for my tastes. Certainly not the greatest video game ever made or even the greatest Resident Evil game ever made.

RE4 Remake gives the RE1 Remake treatment to that title. Everything is improved here. Everything. This feels like the true vision of the original devs without the constraints of limited hardware or not knowing how over-the-shoulder aiming could be refined. The story is great too! This is probably my favorite one in the Resident Evil series to date. I almost teared up at the end. I could go on praising this absolute achievement of the medium, but I'll cut it short by saying this: This is my second favorite RE game (RE1 Remake sitting on top still) and I loved it so, so much. In fact, it's the second RE game I feel comfortable giving a perfect score to.

10/10

This game is so good I beat it twice, back to back. It's a masterful work of art from nearly every angle. It's belly-laugh inducing, tragic, sweet, cynical, optimistic, all under one umbrella. Every emotion on the spectrum can be evoked in Disco Elysium to their heights. To hell with Shakespeare's complete works. Disco Elysium does a better job showcasing every minute feeling a person could possibly have... I assume. I haven't actually read his entire catalogue. Most of it is probably rather boring.

Anyway, there are some bugs. Some technical issues. They're not rare, but they're not common either. In the grand scheme of things, they're sort of charming. So, the only issue in Disco Elysium is one that actually serves to elevate the experience by making you feel more connected to the limitations of the small dev studio that made it.

I wouldn't spoil anything here. Not the protagonist. Not the systems. Not the world. It's all best to be plunged into it blindly for reasons that are obvious about five minutes into the game. All I've gotta say is that Disco Elysium is about hope. Hope for a return. Of happiness, of justice, of love. Disco Elysium looks at The Precarious World, unfazed by its beatings and shouts "ONE DAY I WILL RETURN TO YOUR SIDE."

Then it dances to a funky beat.

10/10

If you own an RTX card, there's no reason to not at least give this shot. Even a lower end 3050 or something. Play around with the resolution, in game settings, and nvidia RT overlay settings. There should be a way to get a consistent 30 fps.

I think this achieved what I was expecting overall. It's really beautiful in a lot of places and the whole game looks lifelike in the way that Mirror's Edge did in the indoor areas of that game. Portal RTX has better textures, but Mirror's Edge is what this resembles most.

I played with a 3060 ti, 5600x, and 32 gb ddr4 memory (clocked 3600 mhz) at 1440p with all visuals put to their highest settings. NVIDIA's built in FPS counter overlay was broken, but I've played enough games on enough systems to tell I was getting a fairly consistent 30 fps, sometimes going up to 40, sometimes going down to 25-ish. It was very playable, as I beat the game with all of these qualities.

great tech showcase/10

The first time I launched it, it said the name "ungabunga" was inappropriate, so it forced me to change it. But I didn't have enough "rename tokens", so I had to go all the way to the Activision website to change a name that was completely PG, to change something that they were forcing me to. They put the hassle on me instead of just changing it to something SFW automatically.

Once I got into game, it said that "update requires restart".

Finally hop into a game, try to say "my nuts hurt" in chat, but apparently that's too NSFW for a game where people shoot each other and scream every curse word in the book at enemies and slice open throats regularly. You can't say "nuts".

And then the game ran like garbage. So now it looks like a PS3 game to target around 80 fps.

But it's still fun, 100% recommend, 10/10, game of the year, game of the century

I've beaten this game about 3 times now. It's good. A 10/10, quality, premium experience. This port is not a lazy one, either. God of War 4 ran a little sluggish, but it was still overall a fine port, so I was a bit cautious about this one struggling to achieve 60 fps on ultra settings, 1440p too. I'm happy to report it runs a lot better than God of War 4. And there are way, way more graphical settings. Dynamic resolution, AMD FSR, ray-tracing, different types of anti-aliasing, just so much to dig into. I'm confident this game can run on an older system very well at 1080p with the amount of tweaking you can do.

Perfect game, pretty good port.

BETA: So, I kind of love this game. An emphasis on the "kinda". The worst thing about it is the almost paywall behind nearly every character. I unlocked one (1) character after three entire hours of play and then another five-ish hours for the next one. Eight hours for two characters with this gigantic roster. If you don't want to do that and actually want to play with the characters you love, then you have to buy them as micro-transactions. I hate this system. I want purely cosmetic unlocks.

The game feels great to play, though. Like they really understood the fluidity of Smash Bros. and replicated it with some tweaks. There's this whole priority hit system that's B.S. and incredibly difficult to learn and predict, then some characters are weak while others are powerful, etc. etc. Whatever. It's fine for now. The pros heavily outweigh the cons and, at the end of the day, this is a free, entertaining smash clone with good netcode. It just works.

Yeah, David Cage is a creep weirdo. If you don't like him because of his writing or his Elliot Page debacle, this game probably won't change your mind. For everyone else, this is a quality experience. Something that borrows so much from other fiction but also one of a kind in the way of presentation and execution.

The amount of paths is truly incredible. To behold. It actually gets a bit ridiculous towards the end, the flowcharts expanding like tree roots. For this feature alone, Detroit is worth checking out. But it also looks amazing. Photo-realistic in a few scenes. The animations are top-tier, the facial motion as lifelike as it can be. All the actors do a fantastic job despite the immense hurdles and burnout that I imagine come with a story of this scope. And you know what? Even the QTE's are good. They feel specially designed for PC users unlike other ports (Resident Evil 4).

I can't help but overlook a couple of aspects to appreciate all there is to love. The story is very, very wonky. Like, characters just go from one place to another without enough explanation or build-up. It's a really "and then this happened, then this happened, then this happened" type of thing. I understand this had to happen because, no matter what, the next chapter can't always be 12 different environments. If there were different areas for every single continuation of a chapter, this game would be simply impossible to make. Still, it feels weird.

Then there's the thing where this game feels tone-deaf and maybe a tad bit disrespectful to peoples who were victim to genocide and state abuse. In real life. The androids wear arm bands and are sent to execution camps for Christ's sake. It's ridiculous. And corny. Just gross feeling allusions that don't get enough discussion in the story to justify their inclusion. There. That's all the bad I had to say about Detroit.

I liked this one. It's good. It's a good game, I think. It allowed me to declare a communist robot revolution in Detroit, Michigan and that's not something you get to do every day.

8.5/10

Having played all three mainline God of War titles and absolutely loving them (especially 2), I was more than hyped for this one. It delivered. Don't get it twisted, this combat and game feel is quite different from the original trilogy, but the same design philosophy lives on. It's slow, deliberate here. Unlike the fast paced utter rage of before. Still, even with all of the power the game allows, it can also deliver a type of brutality only beaten by, what, Dark Souls? In short, it works, and very, very well.

I understand the gripes that God of War 4 changes so much from its predecessors that it is unrecognizable. That is a good thing, though. Again, I have an incredible amount of respect for what Santa Monica did with GoW 1-3 and some of its spinoffs, but there can only be so many games they make that don't take themselves seriously. QTE's for polygon sex, pissing fountains, and boobies galore are no more in God of War 4. It gives the impression that it loves sniffing its own farts because of that in some moments, but mostly? It's heartfelt. Directed by a man who has children himself and developed by people who are probably sick of repeating a formula for the fourth time. The result is gameplay that is some of the most satisfying and weighty in the industry coupled with a story so well crafted that it has me thinking about it all the time, even 4 years after its release.

I remember playing this on PS4 all those years ago. I wanted to 100% it, but there was only one PS4 in the house, only one TV. I was willing to invest about 100 hours into it, but it just wasn't possible without hogging commodities that other people used all of the time, and I definitely wasn't willing to be that kind of guy. When it came to PC, I was able to play it privately for however long I liked. All of this content I never uncovered was finally playable. I cherish that. There are only so many games as gripping as God of War 4, with enough content to keep playing for the foreseeable future. To have it all to myself whenever I please is something I only dreamed of, and something that is now real. This is the exact type of game that should be on PC, and I commend Sony for allowing it on Steam. I hope, hope, hope, that they put The Last of Us 2 here next because DAMN that game is gigantic as well.

9.5/10