Recent reviews by MrTact

I've played a bunch of this game and I have to give it a qualified "no." I'm not a streamer, I don't have dozens of hours every week to devote to this. As such, I guess I fall into the "casual" camp, and this game is not for me.

That doesn't make it a bad game, per se. It's very, very good at what it does, but it demands a considerable investment for you to be able to get value out of the time you put into it. There are literally billions of possible builds -- which is awesome -- but while most of them can chew through world content just fine, 95% won't beat a boss. You have to be thinking about how to maximize your DPS and work around the boss' resistances etc. etc. ad nauseum. And then you have to execute perfectly, because a lot of the bosses have no adds, so you're not filling your flasks back up anytime soon and you will run out. It's like if the most challenging things about soulslikes had a baby with the most challenging things about deckbuilders. That may be exactly what some people want, but that is not me. I have a life, I am moving on.

EDIT: Okay, I came back because I REALLY want to like this game. But I'm still blocked on the Act III boss, because I can't DPS him hard enough to finish him in a reasonable amount of time. Today I actually beat his phase 2 down to NO HEALTH, and he popped back up and killed me. I AM SO DONE WITH THIS. Tired of games that seem designed to make you feel bad about yourself.

Not much improved. Sound keeps switching off (I have a set of SteelSeries headphones and I use their Sonar virtual sound device. You'd think that would work pretty cleanly, given that SS have a partnership on this game, but no, the audio just randomly... stops). And if you're not using WASD, it's a pain to rebind the keybinds because some keys are not bindable, so the driving controls are roughly impossible. I sure want to like this game, but I'm sure not having any success.

I know everybody loves this game, but it is SO DANG HARD to accumulate enough cells to gain permanent bonuses to improve your odds on the next run, I find it incredibly frustrating.

A delightful marriage of a light souls-like with art design and exploration evocative of Breath of the Wild, with a lot of really clever innovations thrown in. Also reminiscent of Elden Ring in the sense that a big part of the game is figuring out how the world works. Suitable for all ages and recommended for pretty much anybody. Maybe the only downside is that I struggled with some of the boss fights and didn't immediately know that there were some other routes I could explore to level up to be better equipped for them

EDIT: I have to mitigate my recommended rating.

The world exploration and puzzles -- very innovative. The art style is delightful and the use of the game manual is certainly innovative. These things all warrant a play. However, every. Single. Boss fight. Is rage-inducing, to the point where I'm going to remove the game from my system now without finishing it, and maybe come back to it in a year.

I appreciate the idea of not everything in the game being a bunch of fetch quests cluttering the map with icons, but Elden Ring goes too far in the other direction.

I don't love the meta -- a lot of the endgame activities are oriented toward being in a clan and doing planned clan activities (there's no matchmaking for raids, for instance, and activities like that are the only way to raise your power level beyond a certain threshold). And yet, I keep playing this game because the moment-to-moment gameplay is incredibly compelling. Guns have a tactile kick and sound amazing. The environments are nothing short of spectacular. Each of the three classes has a unique double-jump that is crazy fun to just let you bop around the battlefield in its own special way. If you're into customizing your appearance, you have a lot of knobs and dials to really tweak out your character's look (and all the armor pieces have a distinctive and very "destiny" look to them). The lore is super-deep and much richer than your average online shooter. And so on.

If you are looking for an online loot shooter, even if you're pretty casual, Destiny 2 can be really fun. Just don't expect to be able to reach the highest tiers of play without a considerable commitment.

I wanted to like this game, I really did, but the word on the game for a very long time was not positive. After it recently got favorable notice on Penny Arcade, I figured I would give it a shot. I did not enjoy the experience. Grim, dully repetitive environments and bullet-sponge enemies do not an entertaining shooter make. Having to install UPlay on top of that is only the icing on the cake. I only regret that I played 10 hours before I decided to give up, because rendered me ineligible for a refund.

Wow was this game surprisingly fun. Much more so than I expected. Sure, it's a little janky, and the progression is meh, but the core game is super entertaining.

...right up until the point where I lost a VERY EXPENSIVE blue weapon I had JUST BOUGHT, shelling out almost all of my cash, when I threw it at an enemy, then died. Either the game deleted it when I died, or the coop player who conveniently popped into my game at that point snagged it.

Either way, eff this game. With literally thousands of other options on steam to choose from, I'm not wasting any more time on it.

Great premise, weak execution. Weapons cost a fortune AND you can't pick up weapons off the cops you take down. Frustrating. You have to babysit objectives for a long time, which is boring, AND they can be interrupted, requiring you to restart them. The game alleges to support stealth play, but in practice stealth is nigh impossible as you can't do anything to stack the deck in your favor unless you go out of casing mode. RPG-like skill trees are costly to advance and not especially useful. It is like they took every single game mechanic and went "how can we make the most annoying version of this feature?" Was very hopeful, now very sad.