Recent reviews by Scourge

The last update of the game added a fun new social feature that collects all of your data. So far so good, a lot of games are doing that.

Unfortunately can you not opt out of this particular feature, which is a violation of the GDPR Policies in the entirety of Europe.

Hence I can not recommend the game, or WB, whatsoever.

The game itself is icnredile fun, the way the game changed from a top down shooter to 3D mayhem is just amazing.

The guns feel good, the Strategems are amazing and fun to deploy and unlock, and even friendly fire accidents make you laugh your ass off more than going into a rage.


However, with the recent change that Sony pulled with the PSN Account can I not recommend it anymore in good conscience.
First it was proven that the game worked fine without requiring a PSN account, and now it is required.
If Sony had a track record of keeping their costumers data safe, I might be tempted to create one, but Sony had more data breaches in the last 10 years than games that they released.

But to top it all off is Sony going into full anti consumer mode by delesting the game NOW, after it was available, in a dozen countries who can not register a PSN account. Which WERE able to buy the game and play it until now.

Basically locking and scamming them out of the game that they bought, and can no longer refund.

In short, spend your money on something else. The game is great. Sony's attitude is not.

"The voice of the lady hit an octave that was usually reserved for opera singers, animals or dolphins. But it
meant that I had a case, and the sound of greenbacks slapping across the back of my palm is always music to me. After all, I am not an opera critic, I am a Private Eye."

The lady needed help. A most precious item of hers had been stolen, a vintage prop gun from a show that I had never heard about, but which was worth a fortune. Of course now it was missing. Whoever the thief had been, was good. The camera's had captured nothing, the windows were solid, no glass shattered, no blood spilled. They went in and out as quiet as a mouse. I checked the door first, but it was clean of anything that could help me with the case. Next I checked the vents. Bingo. Fingerprints.

She had bought the prop privately and secretly. Only her most closet friends had even known about it, which was good. It narrowed down the pool of suspects from the entirety of this Godforsaken city down to just a handful, but I still had my work cut out for me.

12 Suspects to go as I wrote down their name and adresses and began my work. Two of them lived in the same run down building as I did, and as soon as I stepped out onto the streets did it start to rain as if all the angels in heaven decided to take a piss at the same time.

Before I even talked with the suspects checked their doors. Everyone leaves prints and I only found a single pair.
The lady was forthcoming, she gave me her fingerprints and when I asked if she was married, or had someone living with her, she denied so. I believed her. There was after all only a single patch of fingerprints and they matched hers. But they did not match the case.

The next suspect was less forthcoming. She told me to screw myself and leave. Fortunately a little mechanical engineering with the security box allowed me to have a private one to one talk with her, with no one interrupting, as I checked her fingerprints. Again, no match.

I evacuated the premises before she woke up.

On the way to the next three cases I took a quick drink to warm myself up. A mistake. The hooch that they brewed in this joint hit harder than my ex and I only barely managed to stumble back to my own private domicile, though I was pausing a few times as I emptied the contents of my stomach in some discreet corners.

The alcohol did not agreewith and I woke up several times throughout the night. A hot shower was needed in the morning for me to clear my head as I kept going through my head over the various possible perpetrators. They were all guilty, no one in this city was free of guilt. Just varying levels of it.

Once cleaned I grabbed my hat and coat and went out. The lady in my block was more forthcoming, but again the prints did not match.

Three suspects in the Trinity towers. Again, I checked the fingerprints on their apartments. No match, but they were once more not forth coming. But I felt lenient today, and after some hot coffee, I decided to not investigate further.

And then, a hit. The fingerprint matches. A hit out of hundred. The lady is tighter with her replies than my ex-husbands ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ whenever I asked how much he made.

But then I see it. The prop gun. Brazenly displayed on a table in the living room. The perp didn't even have time to get rid of it. Or maybe she collected it like a psychopath to show it off. In either case, my trunchean makes quick work and knocks her out.

Its a clear and shut case as I collect the prop and begin to fill out the notes to send to my client.

Then things become troublesome. She is not alone. With both suspects cuffed and slightly bruised I begin to look through their stuff, their computers, their logs, their wallets. There is no privacy when I am involved, and there is most certainly none in this city. Only The State knows, and it does not care.

Finally I find the ID's and the fingerprints. A match one Jessica and I quietly wonder why she stole it. She was married. She had a good job in HR, a salary of more than 260000 a year. A spacious apartment. She had more than anyone else in this city, but yet it was not enough.

But it is not my job to judge, I just fill out the report, tip my hat and leave them cuffed. The Police will take care of the rest, I inform my client that his prop has been recovered and receive my payment, which is promptly spend on some more booze to celebrate.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow there will be another victim. Someone that needs someones face smashed in, their apartment ruined, their goods stolen, or recovered. If this is not hell, then I don't know what it is.

But what I know is I was born and bred in this city, and that I will die here too. And when I do, like it happens to so many people in my occupation, then I don't think anyone will feel as if the bottom of the barrel has dropped out of their life.

After all, I am just a PI.
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Shadows of doubt puts you into the role of a Private Investigator and lets you loose onto a randomly generated city. You are free to approach any task as you see fit. Beat up the perp, take fingerprints by force, rob and steal everything not nailed down, break and enter, deactivate camera's and security shutters to have private time with people to filcher them. Or never speak to them at all.

You do your tasks to raise your social credit score in this dystopian future, the higher the score, the more forthcoming people are with their information, with the end goal being that you reach level 9, and amass some savings, so you can retire to the countryside.

All characters are interconnected with work and business, which means that if someone does not want to talk and you know where they work, can you sneak or bribe the owner of the company, to let you in and get to the work PC at said company, to print the employee profile.

There are no levels or RPG mechanics, but it wouldn't be a dystopian game, if there were not some cybernetic enhancement in the form of Synthdisks.
Those can be handed out as rewards from missions, but also be randomly found (Read stolen) from premises, or bought from Synthclinics.

There are 18 discs currently, many of which can be leveld up with special vials, which then enhance the effect they have further. Each synthdisk has two options at the moment to choose from, so one can give you a shop discount or make people more talky.

Some discs also have drawbacks but offer great advantages, so you need to judge if it is worth or not, as Synth disks are more plentyful, but the upgrade vials are not.

The game is still in early access, but so far I only had a single bug where I fell through the world floor and broke my legs. I just reloaded an earlier savegame and all was good. Loading times could be improved, as could performance, but the dips are only down to 40 FPS when you leave a building and suddenly the world around you needs to be rendered back in. Otherwise the game runs easily on 60 FPS at 2560x1440 on my Geeforce 3080.

The game overall does NOT hold your hand. There are no 'Talk to this person' quest markers, you do have to investigate yourself and write things down. Fortunately the game provides you with a handy notebook that is accessible anytime you want, and it does give you the ability to let the game find a path to buildings so that you are not entirely lost.
IE: If you are on the other side of the city and want to go to City hall, can you create a quest arrow that leads you there. Same as other places pf residence, shops, and offices, all around the city, so you are not completely lost like in Morrowwind (Go east from here -> Miss the small little village -> End up on the coast)

If you like dystopian freeform games that make you slip into the role and mindset of a PI, where you can play good cop, bad cop, or worst cop, then this game is for you and I'd highly recommend it.

For the first 3 hours ran the game just fine, however after that the issues began cropping up.
issues as the game crashing mid runs, which would be fine if there were autosaves but since it is a roguelike is all progress wiped out.
Fortunately all achievements you unlock and awards you get remain unlocked, unfortunately will 30% of them out of your reach since they require things such as beating the game.

Which is hard to do when Unreal Engine keeps crashing mid play through. So far, after the 3 hour mark, had I 3 crashes in each of the 3 runs I tried to finish.
The first crash happened right before the final boss of chapter one.
The second crash happened right before the 2nd boss.
And the third crash happened in the middle of the first boss fight.

I can't imagine playing through more chapters where I will face more bosses past chapter 1. Hence I can not recommend the game.

As many other reviews have attested is this game an atrocias laggy and buggy mess.

First for the specs of my computer as to get an idea s to why its negatively rated.
CPU: AMD Threadripper 2950x 16 core @ 3.5 ghz.
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 2070S
RAM: 32 GB DDR4@3000
HD Type: SSD.

First off when you start the game and want to play will you be greeted with a loading screen that lasts around 2 minutes. Get used to it, that is the norm unless you fix it manually yourself. (More to that later)
While playing has the game varied between 47 FPS down to 8 FPS, skipping merily between these two with anything inbetween and no reason as to why to, as well as seemingly skipping every second frame too.
Furthermore while playing has the game a constant 167 mb/s read/write to my SSD. During a regular 4 hour play session will that read/write a total of 2404800 MB (4x601200 MB) or alternately a total of 2404 GB/ 2.4 TB of data to your HD.
The game is plagued by crashes that happen while you play, during cutscenes, boss battles, and will then force you to restart from the last proper savepoint you had because autosaves are not as Auto and frequent as you would want to. Alt tabbing out of the game can cause it to crash as well and freeze so hard that you can't even get the Task manager up in Windows 10 so that you have to restart your computer. (Unless you know how to create a second window with Windows Key + Tab and kill the process from there.)

Long Loading Times:
There are two ways to fix the Longloading times and only one works. First if you deactivate V-Sync will the loading times cut down from 2 minues to a more managable 20 to 30 seconds and less. However, deactivating V-Sync causes a GPU leak and your FPS will detoriate until you run the game at a wonderful 5 FPS until you restart it.

The second way is by deactivating Steam Overlay, forcing 30 FPS, and leaving V Sync activate. This too will reduce the loading times to a managable 20 seconds and will have none of the GPU Leaks so you can enjoy the game. Albeit at a capped 30 FPS which is still better than not being able to play it.

To fix the crashes/Alt tab issues/ and the massive read/write issue of the game should you deactivate the EAC anticheat. Without Anticheat is my FPS risingg by a wonderful 30, and that is not 30% but a whole 30 FPS, from 47 to 77 to 80. With Anticheat disabled am I also able to tab out and so far have not experienced a single crash.
Furthermore has the game stopped reading/writing such massive data onto my SSD (And potentially preserving its life) because EAC Anticheat seems to scan all of the game files constantly for any filechanges while you play.


Now to the good part though and the positive of the game:
Combat is good and there is nothing more rewarding than pulling off a combo that kills an enemy that is 9 levels above you in a single hit because you dealt such massive amounts of damage by doing a combat chain
Combat arts are interesting and there are a lot of weapon types: Swords, Daggers, Heavy swords, katanas, whips, bows, dual swords, hammers for you to choose and fight with. Each of them has a specialized skill tree with unlockable skills of which you can slot 4 into the A, B, X and Y slot on the controller. Each of the skills has a rank and you can combo a Rank 1 into a Rank 2 skill for less skillpoints so that you can combo into another skill. So an optimal combo goes: Skill Level 1 -> 2 -> 3. If your companions hit an enemy with a skill at the same time you can unlock chains which will further boost the damage you both deal and will cause even more damage in total.
You also unlock a special Skill Drive which you can unleash for massive damage, for free castings of your skills, or for team attacks.

Skills:
You start the game with three skill trees, Attacker, Tank, Buffer, and each of them leads to 2 more unlockable skills further down the line which are unlocked when A) You buy the appropiate last tier skill in the tree and B) Then fulfil a special requirement and talk to a Hero statue. Don't worry, the game tells you what you need to do to unlock those skilltrees but not which Hero statue to talk to.
Much like combat skills can you equip your character with 4 passive skills and costumize them that way.
To gain more skillpoints will you need to fight stronger foes, so if you are level 20 and fight level 16 enemies will yo uget no skillpoints to further unlock skills. Though you will get XP.

Character Creation:
IMHO they should've let us modify Kirito from the start, but that is just my pet peeve. In the first part of the game, which lasts roughly 10 to 16 hours, will you play Kirito. After that you unlock not just the Character costumization part but also Multiplayer, and further down the line Multiplayer quests, daily quests, and roving player NPC's that you can add to your party so that now there are 8 people in total fighting. During cutscenes will you still show up as Kirito with the same voice and dual weapons, but otherwise you keep playing your costum character.

Story:
I can't say much about the story, or at least compare it to the Anime as I neither watched nor read it, but I found it interesting enough. Albeit the villains of the Academy Arc are a bit over the top and imho, too easily hateable as they got no redeeming qualities, and I really wish I could smack them in the head or do something worse with them. I guess that counts as them being villains then if I hate them? I dunno. The end of Act 1 is combined with a lot of Videos, characters talking and other stuff, and I found it rather boring as it seemed all too formalic. "They are nothing but pawns!" "Every life has its worth!" "Nonsense! Now die! Ahahahaa!" etc.

Once finishing Act 1 you also unlock various difficulties so if you want to fight enemies that are 10 levels higher than you, you can do so. and that is just the Hard difficulty.

Crafting:
There are several crafting skills like: Smithing, Engraving and Cooking.
You can buy most weapons at stores, but they cost a lot of money and crafting items yourself is more worthwhile as they are usually stronger and/or possess additional properties that make them better.


Final Note: Unless the EAC is fixed, loading times are optimized, and the GPU leak is fixed, can I not recommend the game.
Also I'd love some more dual wielding skills like dual wield daggers and other weapons, but eh, its Kirito. That Dual wield swords would be in there -was- a given and should not surprise anyone.

I am usually not one for writing reviews, however Freeman: Guerrilla Warfare is bringing the back of the old Mount & Blade Feel into modern times.

Instead of swords you have guns, instead of a bow you have a sniper rifle. Instead of a sling you got a Rocket Launcher (I suppose, I haven't found one yet but I am sure it will be in eventually).

While the game is still pretty barebones right now is the game also still in early access and the developers are patching like maniacs.

The gameplay itself is rather basic and again I can't help but draw a comparison to Mount & Blade.

You create a character (Character generation is pretty barebones right now), choose a gender, a flag and company name and you are ready to go and conquer the map. You start out with 2 squads and can hire more to replenish your company. The rest of the days you will spend fighting Bandits and Rebels, looting their equipment and selling it while your squads level up and unlock new weaponry and strengths, which makes them more effective at killing enemies as now they may be able to throw grenades.

There are various factions, each with their own units, which you can now capture and possible convert to your cause.

You also have 2 companions which are at your side and can be equipped, and leveld up, just like you.

The map right now is pretty barebones still with only a single mission for you to take and the rest of the time you'll spend hunting mobs to pay your squad.

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In short, if you liked Mount & Blade and want it in modern times, then buy this game. For its current price its a catch and it will only get better.