Recent reviews by Sable Phoenix

I hate to leave a review like this, because I've been anticipating the PC port of Ghost of Tsushima ever since it first launched. It's a gorgeous game, and the gameplay looks like it's the equal to or superior to The Witcher 3, the greatest open-world game to have been created on PC up to this point. Shift Up's respect and passion for Japanese history, culture, and cinematic style is obvious. However, I cannot abide Sony's behavior of late, so I bought this game specifically to leave a negative review and refund it. We have to send a message that the PC gamers will not stand for coercion and restriction.

Ghost of Tsushima is banned from 180 regions, everywhere that cannot create Playstation Network accounts. Helldivers 2 is also banned from sale in all these regions, even though Sony backed off their attempt at requiring people who already purchased the game on PC to create a PSN account or have their ability to play their legitimate purchase stolen from them. I don't know what kind of game they think they're playing, but PC gamers need to show them that we won't stand for it.

As such I cannot recommend that any PC gamer purchase any game from Sony in the future unless they rescind their ban and allow all PC players, anywhere in the world, to play their games without requiring a superfluous and insecure PSN account.

One exception: I do recommend purchasing this game, playing for five minutes to unlock the review box, and then posting a negative review and refunding the game, just as I did. Make your voices heard by Sony the only way we can; with our wallets.

If Sony relents and removes the bans on this game, I'll immediately purchase it again, because I still want to play it. I just can't give the publisher my money in good conscience currently.

Let's start off with the basics. Helldivers 2 is a fantastic game, and Arrowhead is a great studio. I have nothing but praise for the game itself. But requiring a Playstation Network account after three months of live service? That's some scummy practice right there, and all the blame lays on Sony's shoulders. Despite playing it for a couple months now and greatly enjoying it, I'm sadly going to have to uninstall and request a refund due to false advertising once this requirement becomes mandatory.

Sony just can't stop racking up the Ls. First Stellar Blade, now this. This game topped the sales charts as one of the best-selling Sony games of all time is because of PC PLAYERS, and now you're going to try to ban them if they don't sign up for your garbage network that suffers a data breach of the info for millions of people once every two years or so? Get bent, Sony.

Stay away if you're a PC player. Heck, if you're in half the countries of the world, you're going to have to stay away anyway, since PSN is NOT AVAILABLE in your country in the first place. Sony is a dumpster fire of a censorious, greedy, braindead corporation.

I'll be happy to swap this review to the positive one that it deserves if Sony reverses course and allows things to continue as they are. But I'm not holding my breath.

Edit: As of 12:00 AM 5/6/24, Sony issued a statement saying that the May 6th update which would have required mandatory Steam and PSN linking by 5/30/24 will not be going forward. This is promising, but I'll wait to switch my review to positive until it's confirmed that the game is back for sale and full access in all nations that were cut off by the PSN requirement. Only a full reversion will be acceptable.

Edit 2: As of 6/26/28, I'm sorry to say I'm uninstalling the game. Despite Arrowhead's initial stance of shunning any real-world politics, their moderation team has taken it upon themselves to promote present-day politics within their Discord and ban without notice or appeal anyone who expresses any disapproval either with the initial posts or with the moderators' actions supporting those posts. They banned people for nothing more than using certain emotes and then eventually disabled those emotes. Due to the unconscionable hubris of Arrowhead's moderator team, I actively recommend that NOBODY buy, make further in-game purchases, or even continue to play this game. They are turning an apolitical fun space into something overtly political while trying to pretend that they aren't; however the leaks of the changes to the moderation guide reveal that they're promoting a certain political angle and banning anyone who displays anything other than total approval, or at least silent capitulation, to that agenda (the same as other bad actors of the DEI persuasion have infected other areas of the game industry). Sony had their one chance, and Arrowhead had their three strikes, and they've both failed. Arrowhead should their mod team and clean house, demonstrating actual commitment to their previous principles. Until then, stay far away.

Perfect games are few and far between. I would only count a handful of games as actually perfect, games like the original Portal, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and their like. Games where the story is driven by the same central mechanics that drive the gameplay, games that marry art and sound and music so that they all mesh seamlessly and flawlessly.

Hades is one of that vanishingly small set of games.

The gameplay is fast and clean and ridiculously addictive. It is a rogue-lite, which means you'll die often, but that's part of the game. And the genius of it is, you still advance when you die, advance the story, advance the stuff you accumulate (and there's a ton to accumulate), so that the "just one more run!" feeling never goes away. And of course it's totally soaked in the inimitable gorgeous style that is Supergiant Games' trademark by this point.

Get this game. Ge the soundtrack. You will not regret it.

If you ever built tanks and planes and spaceships with your Legos when you were a kid and made them fight each other, boy have I got a game for you.

First off, keep in mind that this game is in alpha, which means bugs happen, performance isn't the best, lots of stuff is placeholder and things change constantly.

That being said, From The Depths already has more content and replayability than 90 percent of fully developed and released titles out there, including triple-A releases by big developers. This game is under constant, aggressive development; gameplay systems, build components, and game balance are actively being added, expanded, and improved. There's typically at least one game update a month, sometimes more, the lead developer is very accessible, and the dev team is largely drawn from the community and is highly active with updates and feedback on the game's website forums.

That's great and all, but how does it play? Frankly, I've never been a big fan of sandbox building games like Minecraft or KSP or Besiege, but From The Depths has sucked me in like no other game ever has. The learning curve is steep, but once you've absorbed how components and systems work you'll find that you can build nearly anything you can imagine: ships, planes, helicopters, dirigibles, tanks, submarines, spaceships, satellites, hovercraft, drones, fortresses, buildings, even mechs (well, sort of, vehicles interact weirdly with solid ground and you can't really make functional legs). Then, you can weaponize all these these vehicles, equip them with custom AI, and drop them into a real-time strategy campaign to test out against a huge variety of community-built enemy factions. You can even make your own campaigns on your own planets. There is literally no end to the gameplay From The Depths offers, and it's only becoming more detailed and interesting as development progresses.

I've already sunk hundreds of hours into this game. I can't recommend From The Depths highly enough. It's the Lego set you always dreamed of having.

WHAT GRAPPLING HOOK?!