Recent reviews by Scabies

Beautiful.
Hard.
But also fair.

People who disagree, need to git gud.

Want to spend 100 hours on a playthrough of a video game only to feel like you only completed 15% of it and somehow still have it be one of the most moving entertainment experiences of your life? This is the game for you!

Edit: I did experience some dips on the more open areas. I never went below 50fps, and the game never felt unplayable or chunky, but I did loose some frames. Worth noting.

I was skeptical that it would run well for me, but after picking it up on sale I've been weirdly impressed. The patches must have made a difference from launch. I've been running a consistent 60fps on 1080p with Epic settings. I turned off motion blur, film grain, and chromatic aberration. Everything else is maxed, and after getting into the 2nd planet everything is still smooth. Maybe its the 1080p 60fps cap that my screen can run, but I find that to be enough. Your results may vary at resolutions or refresh rates above mine.

The game itself is excellent so far. The exploration and world building are great, and the combat is deeper than the first game (which I already found to be wonderful).

Gameplay wise it's worth full price, but I would pick it up on sale just because of the potential performance issues.

Specs: R5 3600, 6700xt, 32gb DDR4 at 3200mhz, 1tb SSD, 25in 1080p 60hz monitor.

A solid capstone to the reboot trilogy. The overall plot isn't as strong as the 2013 reboot, the combat isn't as strong as Rise of Tomb Raider, but this game more than makes up for it in world-building and a more character driven story. This game really made me want another game in this particular version of Lara's story (reboot Lara, not gen-x male fantasy Lara). I feel that Crystal Dynamics really got their ♥♥♥♥ together, pulling all that they learned from 2013 and Rise, creating what is probably the overall strongest Tomb Raider game to date.

Graphically it's beautiful too, and runs well on not insane hardware. My specs are an R5 3600, 1070 8gb, and 32gb of 3200mhz and the game ran at a smooth and steady 60fps on v-sync at all times, pretty much maxed out without ray-tracing. It's well optimized, something that is becoming rare.

Pick it up if you havn't played it. And if you haven't played a modern Tomb Raider game, and don't want to go all the way back to the 2013 reboot, jump in here. You wont be disappointed.

This made me miss Valve games. I know we'll never get HL3, but this little game makes me want it so bad.

The physics
The writing
The animation
All of it

It just has such a nice feel. Thanks Valve for making this, and I hope y'all make more games soon.

This game, truly, is a modern masterpeice of storytelling and gameplay. The swordplay and combat is intuitive and fun, yet on higher difficulties requires a lot of attention and good timing. The world is rich with detail and lore, is expansive in its scope, and is a visual sight to behold. The storytelling is fantastic, with beautifully realized characters, superb voice acting, excellent animations for lip sync AND facial emotion, and importantly excellent writing. There are very few downsides in this game, really just small glitches(Roach on a house anyone?), some pacing issues starting a new game at a higher difficulty, and very small things that bring your out of the immersion (villagers saying the same line over and over again when you do past them. This can be tuned off, but it also makes the game feel a bit empty when done.)

To put simply, however, this is the benchmark for the modern story driven RPG, and very few other games live up to what the CDPR has thrown down here.

A decently crafted, fun, and funny DLC for BL2. Free too! An excellent filler to get us to BL3. Some small glitches with the lip syncing (Vaughn), but really its well done for a 7 year after the release date free DLC. Have fun

This game is beautiful, it's as simple as that. Storytelling that is impressive and never in your face, survival that never feels like a chore, crafting and progression that actually feel intuitive and fun, and exploration that is always fullfilling.

Only marred by the model and texture pop-ins, and occasional glitch that requires a restart to reset.

Besides that? Brilliant.

I've been hearing about Grim Fandango for a long time, mostly for its extreme rarity. However most people say it was a fantastic adventure game in the golden era of point and click adventures. I was never part of that era, I've been getting into newer adventure titles within the past few years and knew very little about the older games. With that in mind, I enjoyed the hell out of Grim Fandango. Were the puzzles nonsensically hard? Yes. Are there the occasional bugs and crashes? Yes. Is it an amazing story with beautiful locals, rich deep characters, and style oozing from every pixel? You bet. The positives outweigh the negatives for me. Yes some of the puzzles seem illogical at times, but thats part of the flavor of this era of adventure game from what I've gathered, and if you work long enough you will find the answer and it will be satisfying. The controls seemed fine to me, I had no issues. Highly recommended!

Simply one of the most interesting, artistic, and moving peice of media I've seen in a long time. The sound and visuals work together to create moments that are down right chilling, in that spooky but not cower under the covers kind of way. Its just a beautiful game, and ANYONE can enjoy it I think.

[Update: 2/13/19]

It's over. The story complete. Chilling and moving right to the very end. I cried. I will always have these characters and this beautiful story to come back to and revisit, but I will miss the feeling of this being an unfinished story. Of looking forward to where the characters and story goes next. To see how the creators will make my hair stand on end in new ways. To be drowned in this beautiful story and world knowing there is more to come.

To those ready to play this for the first time. Welcome, and enjoy your time with this powerful story. Take your time, take it all in, move slow.