Recent reviews by HoverDonkey

Pretty new to extraction shooters, so not much to compare it against, but it's very unusual with my busy life, for me to put more than 5 hours into a game on day 1.

I've got a good gaming rig, and with everything cranked up to the max in 4k resolution, it's probably the most beautiful game I've seen so far. But it's not just style over substance.

Somewhat akin to a Manchester United fan who could only get a ticket in the Liverpool end of the stadium, it feels like every second is fraught with peril and you know your death could be lurking around the next corner. The Arc bots AI is really good, and the PVP element really adds to the tension.

Love the fact that solo is generally a very friendly place to be, but as soon as you squad up everyone is fair game. Arc Raiders is quite unique in this respect.

Forget the skins and the store - Embark have already said there will never be any pay-to-win element as the skins, etc, will be purely cosmetic, so any store purchase is 100% optional.

And, utterly unlike Borderlands 4, this game is really well optimised on day 1 - with absolutely everything cranked up to the max in full 4k resolution, and no frame generation, I'm getting 130-180 fps and it looks utterly gorgeous.

Really looking forward to what the future holds for this game.

EDIT: I've left my original review below, for context, however I am now happy to report that I'm playing the game on my PC, and it's stable and I'm loving it and highly recommend it. The game is so much better than BL3 and the graphics are stunningly good.

It was resolved after installing the latest Nvidia drivers, then uninstalling and reinstalling the game. I also disabled the Discord and Steam overlays as a precaution.


I can play for hours now without any crashes or glitches, so I've updated my review to "recommended".

ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW:

I have a monster gaming rig: AMD Ryzen 9 9950x3D, RTX 5090 graphics, 64Gb 6000MHz DDR5, 4TB Gen5 SDD - this machine can handle absolutely everything I throw at it, with all settings maxed out.

But not this game. No sir.

When I set the graphics to Nvidia's optimised settings, the game crashes back to desktop as soon as it hits the game menu. I have to seriously cripple the settings in order to get the game to run at all, and even then it's crashing out at random intervals, and losing game progress into the bargain.

I've really enjoyed the few hours I've managed to play, but it's constantly marred by the fear that at any second I'm going to get dumped back to my desktop, so I've stopped playing and can't recommend that anyone, in its current form, purchase this game.

After several patches, all claiming to have addressed unspecified "performance and stability issues", I now have zero confidence that this game will ever run on my system and that have 95% confidence that I've wasted more than £80 of my hard-earned money.

Shape up, please, Gearbox - I'm not a happy man.

I now have woodchip on my V12.

Balatro will devour you life.

And you'll thank it.

Game starts, but can't select any menu items, either with mouse or controller, so can't actually play the game.

I'm sure it's great, however!!!

Game starts, but can't select any menu items, either with mouse or controller, so can't actually play the game.

I'm sure it's great, however!!!

No middle lane FTW

Frustrating,

1980s?

Think you're good at being 1980s?

Then I've another think coming for you...

Kung Fury is more 1980s than the actual 1980s ever were, are, or ever have been!

If you're looking for 1980s, then Kung Fury will have removed your spine before you've even hacked back to the 1990s!!!

Epic!!!

If u don't buy this, then quite franky you suck!