Recent reviews by lb-Cyber

The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is something I've enjoyed and spent many hours in.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is, at its best, a great sandbox for recreating your favourite scifi universes and to pursue new and exciting stories.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is fun.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is surprisingly well-optimised
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is impenetrable.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is terribly-optimised.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris can be a really engaging experience.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is dull.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris is full of passion.
The game in my Steam library called Stellaris has no soul.

I don't know what this game is, because with almost every patch, Paradox interactive rewrites its mechanics into something entirely unfamiliar and frustrating. There have been a few lucky moments where the build I played was fun and engaging. There have been many times where it was a weird, unappealing simulacra of that other game.

There are far-too many cynical and exploitive DLC packs. The game is treated by its developer more as a cash cow than an experience. I remember it being great sometimes, and utterly terrible in others.

With any good RTS, you build on your experiences with its mechanics and quirks and develop into a better and more efficient player. With Stellaris, your experiences feel like a waste, because the game's patches upend its flow into something unrecognizable virtually every time it's patched. it doesn't feel rewarding. It feels like a slog.

A game about exploration, about science, about discovery, about our connection to each other and, occasionally, about forgetting to put on your spacesuit before leaving your ship and dying an embarrassingly stupid death in the cosmos.

Outer Wilds is about all these things, but it's far more than the sum of its parts. It's not only a wonderful experience through and through, but it's a deeply poignant tale about what makes any journey worth taking, and the connective tissue we all share in our wanderlust.

In pretentious terms, it's transcendent. But to put it in a more grounded way: It's the best game I've ever played, and I never stop thinking about it.

You can punch your bullets to make them go faster. Perfect / 10.

As full of heart, charm and ponderous sincerity as the original, maybe moreso.

The puzzles are also pretty good.

zane is a compeling protagonist and their were so many twists and turns in the story i almost died for real... just kiddin but game is awsome bwlllll

A near-perfect game developed by a team of genuinely talented and passionate people.

You should play it, and tell the former developers of Tango Gameworks how much you enjoyed their work.

You should NOT purchase it.

An incredibly effective dopamine generator disguised as that one weird DOS shareware game you don't remember buying.

Short and sweet horror with a great and effective mechanic.

Great writing, carefree exploring, and a gator waddling animation I didn't know I needed in my life.

It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and an experience that directly channels your inner child.

From Software has taken everything they learned from their past titles and woven the best bits together into a compelling mosaic draped over a new open world experiment. It works, mostly, and with surprising amount of polish... mostly.

Pacing is an issue, as some areas and dungeons seem suited for your level only to immediately launch skyward in difficulty. Fromsoft's design philosophy has always been to be very hands-off when guiding the player. If you forget where an NPC told you to go, you've lost that guidance (unless you go to go Google). The next step in any quest isn't always immediately obvious. For a linear game like Dark Souls, this isn't really a problem. For an open world game the size of Elden Ring, it's very much an issue. Forgetting the location of an NPC can mean never finding them again.

And then, there are the bugs. This is another point where From Software must, hopefully, change their old habits.

In all their previous games, From Software shows no interest in patches or providing general technical support (for years, players relied on community-made patches to fix the more glaring issues in the original Dark Souls on PC). Elden Ring has many problems requiring fixing, especially when it comes to performance and stability (game stutters are frequent and sometimes become so bad the game becomes unplayable).

With an experiment of this scale, more things can go wrong (and have), and Fromsoft really needs to rise to its self-imposed challenge and finally commit itself to fix its bugs.

Elden Ring is a fantastic and fun game, but it deserves at most a qualified recommendation: Performance issues are plenty and can ruin the experience. Your mileage may vary.

Edit: A patch has now added icons on the map noting the location of most NPCs. Performance issues have not yet been fixed.