Recent reviews by Numitron

I cannot say that I could recommend that really.
Voice acting is well done. Writing and subject matter is interesting.
Graphically it is, well, a bit basic, but not offensive. I don't really mind, especially in VR.
The "puzzles" do not present any kind of challenge nor do they present any good gameplay (this is from someone who really enjoyed I Expect You To Die).
My main problem is that the game does not reward you, or even interact with you, at all. There are no choices (please tell me if I am mistaken), no branching paths.
Well, you could say that it makes sense considering the story, but if so, it makes it a pretty boring even if tragic story.
I felt absolutely not engaged. VR also doesn't feel like it adds anything to the game.
I removed my headset after the experience and felt like I'd wasted my time.

The creators of this game are obviously talented and I'm pretty sure they can make some really great stuff, but they have to engage the player, otherwise even the most dramatic and tragic narrative will fail to motivate him to go on.

It's beautiful, has an amazing concept and core mechanics, generally very well executed, but it has a fatal flaw:
It's way, way, way too damn hard. And that's coming from someone who thoroughly enjoyed Super Meat Boy.

The karma system makes death extremely punishing, and death is extremely common (try, die and repeat style), keeping you in loop for hours on end without making any trace of progress, and therefore, makes the game hardly rewarding to play. Also, the fact that ennemies have such random placement and behavior makes it prety much impossible to master your fate. Ultimately, the game can kill you at any moment with cheap deaths (e.g. getting snapped by lizard located under you in another, unseen part of the map). If I get through where I want to go unharmed, It's not even rewarding, because you rather feel like you were lucky rather than competent.

This is compounded by the floaty controls which makes controlling slugcat unsatisfying at best. Platforming itself is also quite hard and with those controls, it's infuriating.

I really, really want to like this game, and keep getting back to it for 20-30 minutes at a time to just try to do, well, something, but I can't say I'm having fun playing it.

A sad example of the concept overriding actual fun gameplay.

Wait! This game will seemingly be amazing. For an indie title, or heck even an AA title, the content is great. However, it is an Early Access game and it shows. Unlike so many EA games, this one is actually because of lack of balancing or game-breaking bugs, not lack of content.

PRO:
- VERY serious System Shock and Bioshock vibes
- Great UI, if a bit unwieldy at times
- Awesome world design
- Rewarding exploration
- Avoid the "walking simulator" syndrome
- Interesting storyline
- Pretty graphics

CON:
- Game-breaking bugs
- Save-breaking bugs
- Sound bugs
- Need more ambiance!
- AI is just buggy and broken (sometime causing impromptu NPC interpretive dance)
- Lighting bugs (Environments extremely dark despite lights being on ; no gamma slider)
- Complete lack of directions or environment awareness (Give more hints on what to do to achieve something!)
- Player has no personality or purpose (What is he, what he thinks, what is going on? You just appear in the world. )
- Better mapping system. Easy to turn in circles in buildings, especially when you get lighting bugs!

However, overral, the game, sadly, currently does not work properly due to technical problems and this is why I cannot recommend it at the present. I will change this review as soon as the development team will address the most critical game and save breaking bugs.

TL;DR: If you liked System Shock, you will love this game. However, don't buy it now, it's broken.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ranks easily in one of my favorite games of all time. It's an unstable, bug-laden, often-mistranslated with cheating AI piece of game, but god does it do something good.

The ambience, the stress, the setting, the mechanics... Everything that makes an open-world survival game great, way before the recent survival craze on steam. The game is hard as balls by concept, and would have it no other way.

If it reminds you of the Metro series, well, there's a good reason: much of the same people who worked for GSC Game World fo the Stalker series went to do Metro for 4A games. In a sad turn of events, GSC Game World screwed over its employees, and has basically died since this game has come out, so we might never see a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game again.

Call of Pripyat is arguably the best game in the series due to it relative stability and more mature gameplay mechanics, where Shadow of Chernobyl feels rough around the edges and Clear Sky is just instable and buggy as balls. The main character story was more interesting in Shadow, was utterly uninteresting in Clear Sky, and is mildly interesting this time around in CoP due to a few other characters,,,

You like FPSes, survival games, getting out of here stalker, open-world games, russians swearing, looking at X-Ray engine crash dumps, and crouching in radioactive mud because you're being sniped at midnight by bandits? Buy this game. Now,

This is ridiculous. What have you done, Activision? Prototype was one of the best sandbox games I've ever played. The controls are awesome, the protagonist was interesting and Alex Mercer was one hell of a killing machine. Never had I experienced such freedom to wreak havoc and the leveling system was enjoyable.

Now, Prototype 2 is... largely inferior to its predecessor, to say the very least. The protagonist is not charismatic at all and dumber than a box of nails. He's a much stereotypical videogame generic badass like only Activision knows how to do.

Very bad QTEs and a stupid and extremely invasive tutorial marks the first part of the game. I generally enjoy a quick in-game tutorial, but this is one of the worst I've ever seen. This gets especially ridiculous when the game stops the gameplay to show you something you had to figure out for yourself earlier to advance. I'm not five year old, mind you.

The great freedom you had in Prototype is now gone! The map is way smaller, and there is so much less to do. You can't choose your upgrades at will anymore! You have to wait until predetermined ''evolutions'' to add a point to one of a few attributes. And its not a new move, it's just statistics, like adding 10% sprint speed or 20% more damage. It's boring as hell.

Also, the character asset design took one hell of a hit. The texture quality of Heller and other NPC/PC is just dreadful, especially when you compare it to the otherwise well textured and lighted environment. I believe it's even worst than the first game.

The animation, to my surprise, is not very good either. The animation of vehicles during in-engine cutscenes is robotic, in a way similar to early 2000 games. I don't understand why the developper could not fix this.

Now, the technical problems... This will be a deal breaker for many people. This game is just terribly optimized. There is a HUGE memory leak problem that was never (and will never without a doubt) be fixed. This appear to be related to ATI graphics cards. I have a rather solid rig which can run pretty much anything right now at max settings and at a 1680x1050 resolution. I possess 8Gb of RAM + 2GB GRAM. The game can run for approx 30 minutes before the leak occupies all the allocated RAM and starts to lag horribly. This time interval may be smaller if you have a smaller amount of RAM or your system is less powerful. The solution is to alt-tab out of the game when this happen and then go back. The leak will still continue and therefore, you are stuck doing this every 30 minutes or so.

This is not a good game. It have many fragments of awesome, but the problems are just so many and so hard to get around that it just outweights its qualities. It's still Prototype though and you'll still have fun wreaking havoc around NYC (NYZ), but if that's all you wanted, go play the first. It got more moves and is funnier overall to play, while the graphics are sufficient to appreciate gameplay at this day.

I don't know what you did to Radical during development, Activision, but you killed them, and you killed Prototype.

I hate you for what you are doing to the gaming industry.
That's all I have to say.

It's hard to explain why it's fun to save your country from debt, but it is. You gotta like sliders and economy management, in which regard the games gets pretty deep, though.

The game is hard at first, as you obviously want to push your own belief in the game at first, which is certain doom.

To turn your conservative and religious state into a furiously liberal socialist one, you have to be patient, and do everything every group asks without any moral convictions at first. The first priority is to avoid deficit, because when you get caught in the debt machine, interest rate shoot up so high you are stuck in an unescapable spiral into financial catastrophe (like what happens right now). Carbon tax and fixed income tax can get you out of debt pretty quickly. Slowly, you invest in education, start banning prayer and creationism from schools, investing in science, slowly eating into the religious group until they are left without any voting (or assasination) importance. Then, promote commuters and start wellfare programs while slowly paying the national debt, decreasing interest in capitalistic ventures. When, finally, the debt is paid and you start stockpiling money in hundreds of billions, hit the capitalists hard with wellfare and more social programs until their number plummet down. Lower taxes and invest in the happiness of the wealthiest groups to stabilize the GPB with a small growth. Continue until you end up in the green for everyone except the capitalists and religious.

Congratulations, you just created a techno-socialist utopia!

But, what then? After you figure out something like this, the game doesn't have much replayability. But it was quite of fun and it was worth it.

Well, it's bad. I've played more terrible games before, but that game is just bland and flavorless. If you enjoy very linear third person shooters with no other mechanics, then this is for you. They tried to bring new mechanics like the tactical view and the base, but they're useless in the end due to lack of content and faulty IA.

You may mildly like it, but I don't think it's worth it, even during sales.