Recent reviews by Jester

This game takes me back to the good old days of EQ. It captures that feeling so perfectly, and the simplayers are so fun and unique that sometimes I forget they aren't actually people. The dev works really hard updating the game with bugfixes and new content, and manages to maintain his vision while also listening to player feedback. I'm so excited to see how this game develops further.

This game holds a very special place in my heart. It's the last game I played with my best friend and gaming buddy of 15 years before he died. He'd been after me for weeks after it launched to give it a shot until I finally did. We had one amazing week of helldiving before he went. This game kept me sane in the following weeks, kept me focused enough to not fall apart every five minutes. And it allowed me to hold onto him a bit longer, to feel close to him. Like at any moment, he'd join my game and ask if we were hunting bugs or bots. So I can't give you an unbiased review of Helldivers 2. I can tell you that it's incredibly fun and I adore it, but even if it were garbage, I'd still love it because it was my last game with him. And that one week of helldiving we had was some of the most fun we've had in years.

I just wanted to post this review to say thank you, Arrowhead, for these final memories we were able to make.

This game was absolutely incredible. I almost didn't get it because, while I was certain I'd love the story, I didn't think I'd enjoy the gameplay. I'm not a fan of turn-based combat and I suck at quick dodge/parry mechanics. And that's why I was so shocked to find that I loved EVERYTHING about this game, especially the combat! It was so much fun to learn new fights and so rewarding to beat those tough battles. I felt like this game respected my time, too. All the side content was optional (and enjoyable, 'cause I did it, all of it), and I was able to save often if I needed to step away. I had zero performance issues, no bugs, no crashes. It was just a great experience in every way. The characters were wonderful and memorable, the animations and expressions just so well done and lifelike. The music was superb. And the story was...really beautiful and serious, and handled so maturely, with such care. I really appreciated that. There's also enough levity that you remain afloat despite the heavy subject matter. It doesn't weight you down, it keeps you moving forward toward truth and hope. I know there's nothing in this world that is without flaw, but for me, this was a perfect game.

I was skeptical about Sun Haven after reading lots of critical reviews, but so far I've been having a great time! It plays a lot like Stardew Valley while still having its own identity, which is honestly what I want in a farm sim. I love the main quest that integrates you into the game's mechanics and introduces you to the villagers, and just how easy it is to jump into farm life. Mechanically, I think it's great fun. Setting-wise, I love it. A magic town with a mix of fantasy races is right up my alley. Characters? Well... I didn't love my first few encounters with the villagers because they seemed a bit ridiculous to me. The bachelorette sprites are a bit fan-servicey and the first guy I met was kind of an idiot. Then the cat girl showed up "nyaning" all over the place, and I cringed a little. But the more I've played, the more I've fallen under their spell, and I find myself liking the cast a lot. I've seen the comparison in a lot of reviews, but I wouldn't say the NPCs are better or worse than those in SDV, just that they are their own group with their own style, and it's been fun getting to know them.

A couple small things I wasn't crazy about at first... 1) The character creator did leave something to be desired because they give you all these amazing options for neat fantasy races but then barely any clothing choices. It took me forever to settle on something not because I couldn't decide on a race or look, but because I was trying to find a style that "fit". Something about an elf in a hoodie was weird to me. 2) There is hardly any context for your character. If you play the intro, you are actually shown another character's reason for coming to Sun Haven, and that character meets yours on the train. When you arrive at the station, everyone is like, "Oh you're our new farmer!" And I just thought, "....I guess I am!" I mean, I get avoiding the whole inheriting-the-farm trope, but it would've been nice to have a little more context for my character and not some other random NPC whom I don't know or care about (yet).

Otherwise, I'm really enjoying the game and look forward to playing more! There's a lot of neat approaches the game takes that definitely make it worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre.

UPDATE: Now that I've played more, I see what people are talking about when they say the villagers are shallow. Trying to raise affection with them automatically puts you in a sort of romantic position with them, and you go on two dates just trying to get them to 10 hearts (the "friendship" maximum). After they reach 10 hearts, they have almost nothing to say to you. I'm not a fan of this. I don't want to "date" everyone in town and it feels weird that their "arc" revolves around dating you. Also, it would be nice if the devs gave the NPCs a handful of repeatable dialogues you could engage with them even after reaching 10 hearts. I prefer the way SDV did it, where each person had a small story arc over the course of maxing out their hearts, and only after you hit the max for friendship could you pursue romance with them. Still am enjoying the crap out of this game, but I do find the way the bachelor/bachelorettes were handled to be a bit disappointing.

I really had fun with Starfield. It was very much a Bethesda game, but that was what I expected going in and, overall, I wasn't disappointed. I thought the game looked good and it ran very well for me. I only ran into one significant bug (the Neon Ship Technician was MIA), but otherwise I didn't have any other issues. I enjoyed the combat and exploration for the most part, I found most of the characters and companions to be well-written and interesting, and I liked the majority of the side and faction quests. The main quest was the low point for me... It honestly infuriated me with how nonsensical and unearned it was and, out of stubborn rage, I refused to go to NG+ (except for the half-a-minute it took to snag the achievement). But other than that, I loved Starfield. Yes, the skill trees need some work and yes, all the systems are really shallow, but it was still a lot of fun for me and I look forward to seeing what the modding community will do with this game.

UPDATE: After a few months, I came back with mods to address some of the gameplay issues I was having, specifically a camera mod and an auto-junk seller for inventory management, and this really helped me overcome some of the hurdles barring my path to fun. I also changed the class I was playing, so the combat didn't feel quite so dull to start. With these changes, I was able to start getting into the story and found Act 1 to be absolutely spectacular. I thought the game's main narrative took a dive in Act 2 and Act 3 was ridiculous (I also took offense to the butchering of some BG2 guest stars, but that's probably WOTC's fault, not Larian's), but the companion stories and certain side quests were among the best of the best. And it was the companions and these side quests that stuck out the most and made me actually like this game. I'll also begrudgingly admit I started to enjoy the combat at about the halfway point. Though I still have some issues here or there and need mods to really be able to enjoy it, I definitely loved my overall experience and so I'm changing my review to recommended!

Orignal Review:
To be honest, I didn’t think I’d like this game. I’m a huge fan of BG1&2 but I did not enjoy DOS1&2, and I felt like BG3 was going to be another DOS2 with a D&D paint job. But it began to take such a beautiful shape, everyone was praising it so highly, and so many people were saying that if you didn’t like turn-based combat that you still might like this game, so I started to think I might be wrong and that the most disappointing thing about BG3 would be the way I would have to admit to putting my foot in my mouth for how much fun I actually had playing it but...

I really did not have fun playing it.

There are a ton of tiny issues that bar my path to fun. 1) The camera drives me crazy. It's too close, and having to rotate it constantly, phase through the environment, and struggle with the leash is so frustrating and I haven’t once enjoyed exploring because of it. 2) The number of containers I feel compelled to open to find junk at best, nothing at worst is tedious to the extreme. Looting should be exciting and fun, but in BG3, it's a chore. I stumbled into a vault the other day and groaned because I knew I would have to open every dumb crate, barrel, and vase because gaming for 20 years has trained me to do that, and it would take forever, in part due to the obnoxious pathing issues that cause characters to walk 10 ft back and forth to open a container right next to one they just opened. 3) I have to hold down alt to click on stuff because there’s so much crap and the mouse highlights all of it except the one thing worth clicking on, but then the game doesn’t seem to register more than one click at a time so if you click to pick up one item and then click to pick up another before the character is finished interacting with the first, they just stand there and you have to reissue the order. 4) Because the alt-viewed item labels shift when one thing gets picked up, you often accidentally pick up stuff you don’t want when you’re trying to move through the process quickly, and then you have to dig through your inventory to ditch the unwanted item because inventory clutter is REAL in this game. 5) Selling is annoying. You can quickly mark things as wares, but almost never sell them with the sell all button because the NPCs never seem to have enough money. So you're back to selling or bartering bit by bit. 6) The fact that there's no option to automate some of the tedious dice rolls is just outrageous. The novelty of clicking the dice wore off after the first 10 times, so disarming all the traps becomes a slog. 7) The fact that there's no settings option to hide failed passive rolls is beyond irritating. Quite frankly, I don't want to know when I'm failing something I didn't know existed until I failed it. I could argue it’s unimmersive, but it’s mostly because when I KNOW, my curiosity demands I reload, which is its own nightmare.

These issues account for about 70% of the game as I've experienced it so far.

The rest is combat. I don't like turn-based combat so I expected I wouldn't enjoy BG3s combat, but everyone was like, "Don’t worry, it feels so good!" No. No, it doesn't. It's as boring and tedious as I've always found it to be. But I feel like I could tolerate it and find some enjoyment in the game if the rest of it wasn't such a frustrating slog. I tell myself to just keep playing and maybe I’ll get past it, but after 45 hours, I’m still aggravated and will often let days go by before I boot it up again. I have to dig deep for the motivation to play, because all I can think about is how I'll spend 2 hours on 15 minutes of gameplay I didn't even enjoy.

I won’t comment on the story or characters because I’m too biased by the frustrating gameplay to be fair right now. The voice acting is well done. That’s all I’ll say.

Listen, most people love this game, and that's great. I'm not saying it's a bad game. I'm merely saying that I don't have fun playing it. I’m not giving up entirely, but I am going to put it down for now and wait for Larian to finish updating and patching it. Hopefully they will address some of these QoL issues, and then maybe there will be mods that cover the rest so that I can finally play this without feeling like I'm struggling to have fun. And maybe this game will never be a game for me, who knows. I’m clearly on the outside here, so take this review with a grain of salt.

This game suffers from action movie sequel syndrome like nothing else. Seriously, the writing is so terrible, I actually burst out laughing many times. I think my favorite gem was, "I'm in control because I'm not afraid to take control." The story made absolutely zero sense and, when it wasn't being unintentionally funny or diving into tropes like it was going for the high score, it actually made me angry with how predictable and stupid it was. I swear, the writers room was like 5 people in a circle chewing on their pencils and writing this game scene by scene on the basis of whose idea sounded the coolest.

They didn't even TRY to make sense. They went for every single trope in the book. Every single one. I mean they shot down more helicopters than the first Suicide Squad. And the characters are written in a way that it's almost like the developers expect you to care about these people, but they were practically caricatures and parodies of whatever their designated action movie role was. Almost everyone you meet is like, "I'm ANGRY because everything is BAD and I don't TRUST YOU!" until you do one mission for them and then suddenly you're getting that handshake and solemn nod with a throwaway, "Good job, agent. I was wrong about you."

And when I say the writing is bad, that extends to the programming. I mean you crash like it's a feature. But if you can manage to get a few hours under your belt, the gameplay itself is pretty fun. I like that they added more opportunities to engage with enemies than in Division 1 and the new skills were fun to use. Combat is what you expect. It's a shooter. It works. Therefore, it's fun. With one caveat: they force you into story mode for most of the game. This made playing sooooooooooooooooo boring until you finish the story. I had to play as recklessly as possible just to make it remotely interesting. Granted the transition from the main campaign to the Black Tusk nonsense almost made me quit for how stupid it was, but the fact they finally allowed me to start setting mission difficulty right away made up for it. Finally, the game was FUN. And then I get to Warlords of New York and it's back to boring story mode... Seriously, what in the world were they thinking?

Anyway, I had fun shooting dudes in the face with a shotgun, but everything else about this game annoyed me to no end. I wouldn't say I hated it, just that I don't recommend it.

Tonally, this game is on point. It looks amazing and the details are incredible. The music is wonderful, the voice acting is very good, and the dialogue is well-written. (It was rather refreshing to play a character who was polite and to interact with other characters who were polite.) And overall, the game was just fun to play. After rebinding block and dodge to my mouse, I found combat to be smooth and engaging and just tons of fun.

However, there are a few significant disappointments that definitely left me frustrated. The "your legacy is what you make of it" tagline they used is a bald-faced lie. Your legacy is not what you make it. It's what Avalanche makes it. The story is entirely linear and every illusion of choice that you have (of which there are very few) is just that: illusion. No choice you make matters at all to how the story is delivered and concludes. In fact, the game often doesn't take your already shallow choices into consideration in any way. For example, and without spoilers, at the end of a specific questline, you have to make a choice on whether to send a character away or allow them to stay. I chose to allow them to stay. And in the wrap-up cutscenes of the game when everyone was present, this particular character was excluded from the cutscenes as if the game assumed I had sent them away. It was as though Avalanche just didn't want to deal with the choice at all so went in the only direction that would fit both scenarios. This left a bad taste in my mouth. I am not sure why Avalanche made the choice they did to make choices meaningless, but they have sacrificed replayability in doing so.

As a quick aside, Avalanche had the perfect IP to insert a morality system with the whole dark wizards thing and they chose to ignore it, which feels very strange to their own plot. I read somewhere that they were trying to be inclusive to every play style, but that just makes the story shallow and linear and guts any potential replayability the game might have had.

Lastly, I was so disappointed by the lack of agency you have to be a student at Hogwarts, which is 85% of the appeal of the game. You could replace your 15 year old student with a 25 year old teacher and the story would be the same. You can't go back to your dorm to sleep. You can't sit down in the Great Hall for a meal. You never have to do homework. You barely go to class. And you can't interact with the other students except when the game tells you that you can, which was a huge disappointment for me and felt very strange. I wanted my experience as a student to have as much weight as my experience as the hero, but instead it felt very superficial. In the end, I was a plucky teenage adventurer who spent more time murdering people in the forest than anything else. Just like every other open-world RPG I've ever played (minus the being a teenager bit).

I think the part of this that upset me the most was the inability to form relationships with the other students outside of their respective questlines. For example, and without spoilers, one of the characters gets in trouble on your behalf. Afterward, I tried to talk to them about it, to say thank you at the very least, but I couldn't speak to them until they were ready to offer me a quest. That was so frustrating. Especially since this character and mine talk about trusting each other and tell each other secrets pretty early on, and that trust felt completely unearned because the only time I could talk to them is during those quests. Just a repeatable, generic dialogue interaction of, "How are you? How are your classes going?" with 3-5 recycled responses would have been enough to simulate some kind of relationship developing. Granted, the interactions on the quests and the dialogue was superb and I loved every second of them, but it would have been nice to feel like these characters were your friends at school, not random adventuring buddies. Being able to have fun yet meaningless interactions with them (going to the Great Hall for dinner, doing homework together, hanging out in the common room) that just let you feel like you were a student making friends would have increased my enjoyment of this game 100%.

Finally, the lack of context for your character was aggravating. I would argue Avalanche was trying to be vague on our backstory to allow us to play who we want to play, but it was too vague and left a lot of questions. Your character is pigeon-holed into a specific personality and narrative regardless of your choices, so why bother ignoring the details like this? It actually does a disservice to you as a player and the story you experience by pretending you can be whoever you want, because you can't.

At the end of 95 hours, I can honestly say that I enjoyed the game. I truly did. It was fun and, even though I don't see any real replayability in it, I definitely feel like I got my money's worth with my playthrough. But the game still feels like a giant missed opportunity. And that's a shame because a few changes could have really made a difference.

This game broke my heart. I recommend it, but you have to understand before you play that this story is a tragedy. The hopeful ending of Innocence does not return for Requiem and you will not walk away with a warm feeling. I was so sad that I cried messy, ugly tears. Still, it was a beautiful game with wonderful characters and I don't regret the experience. I just desperately wish for a happier ending.

I will say that, in hindsight, there are issues with the narrative, but I didn't notice as I was playing because the characterization is just so good. There were concepts introduced that didn't get fleshed out completely, times when the story seemed to contradict itself a tiny bit, and the story seemed to move far too quickly to feel entirely natural. I thought the ending was somewhat forced. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that it was a bit too engineered. And while I loved the new side characters and thought they were well written as characters, they were pushed into the narrative too quickly to "fit", and thus had much less impact than the orphans from Innocence. Hugo, Amicia, and Lucas were still outstanding, and I adored every second they were onscreen.

One of the biggest disappointments to me was the characterization of the rats. In Innocence, they were a character of their own. They were an antagonist to start, unstoppable and mysterious, and they eventually became an ally and our path to victory. In Requiem, the rats were purely a soulless device of destruction and obstruction. Cinematic, certainly. But devoid of the same weight they had in Innocence.

There were some gameplay changes I liked, such as the crafting changes, and some I didn't care for. As for combat, I felt more pressure this time around that I didn't appreciate. It was nice that stone ammo was infinite and you could carry more pots, but that didn't seem worth the trade-off of 80% helmeted enemies. There was no alchemical way to deal with them like in Innocence, and that was probably so you'd use some of the new weapons, but I found those new weapons were actually more stressful than helpful to me due to their limited availability. I also thought the enemies were a bit uninspired and repetitive, and I didn't enjoy combat as much as in Innocence. For example, the slavers were the exact same enemy types as the Count's men, just reskinned. This eventually made the enemy encounters tedious and boring. And certain sections of the game seemed present only to lengthen the runtime (ex: the slaver section), and could have served better by being cut entirely, trimmed down, or shifted to be more exploratory and puzzle-oriented than combat/stealth-focused.

Finally, I know the developers wanted to up the ante, but (this might be a bit spoilery so read at your own risk) by the end of the game, they have destroyed three whole cities in true medieval "Michael Bay" style dramatics. And it felt like they were trying to beat their own record with every city. The first one took about 2-3 days, the second one was done in roughly 36 hours, and by the third one, we don't even get to go inside the gates! It's being destroyed as we arrive. It didn't create high stakes as much as it came across as ridiculous.

In spite of these issues, I was never exhausted by playing. I was never itching for it to end. I loved every second of it until the final five minutes, which truly gutted me. But only because I, like Amicia, was so desperately holding on to hope for a better end.

All in all, the thunderous praise from Innocence still holds true for Requiem - the brilliant characters, the amazing voice acting, the beautiful and chilling and terrifying and incredible environments, the wonderful music. I don't like tragedies and, yes, this game has some flaws, and yet I still recommend it. It was an emotional journey that I will never forget and I loved it in spite of the heartache that I still feel days later.

It took me so long to actually play this game and, after a few years of will-I-won't-I, I finally did and all I can say is, "Why did I wait so long?" I recommend this game 100%. It was incredible! It isn't long, but the emotional journey makes it feel longer than it is, makes your heart full. Everything in this game was so expertly done - the characters, the story, the music, the environments, the tone. I noticed some reviewers have complained about how linear the game is, but I prefer it with this sort of game. There's a level of urgency to the story that would be ruined with an open world format. The gameplay mechanics were simple but engaging, blending just enough stealth and combat to make for a satisfying experience that also felt believable within the scope of the story. But it was the story that mattered the most, the characters that made this game truly shine. Amicia's fear and desperation was so beautifully portrayed, and Hugo, with those little cheeks and big eyes, was so precious and innocent and easy to fall in love with, and within moments of meeting him, I wanted to protect him as much as Amicia did. The love between siblings, the bond between young people trying to survive in a harsh world - it's not a story we see often and I loved every moment of it. I can't wait for Requiem!