Recent reviews by Stormy

Starts okay enough but the grind becomes absolutely ridiculous. I'm pretty sure I make faster progress working out in real life. Everything comes crashing to a halt and there is nothing to do but sit there bored and watch your time get disrespected.

Vinnie Gognitti is the best character in any piece of media ever

memes aside this just sucks

"Oh yeah I'm almost ready to leave, lemme just flash this V3 real quick"
the V3 in question:

It's basically fine in every single way, never really better than fine and never really worse than fine. But, ough, it's so clearly a project made for the purpose of "I wanted to make this" and that attitude coming through the game makes this a very good "it's just fine" game. I like that this thing exists and I like coming back to it for like, an hour at a time every 4-5 months.

who up trousleing they bones

A good narrative washed out by a combat system that starts off amazing and quickly becomes agonizing and boring over time. Prey is just kind of decent at what it's trying to accomplish and not much more than that. Arkane was trying to walk a tightrope with this one. That kept things interesting for a while, but Prey just doesn't know what it wants to be.

I did quite like the narrative that Prey went for. I won't spoil anything here, but the game makes it abundantly clear that none of the information you receive is ever truly reliable, and while clues exist in the world they themselves aren't reliable and are jumbled together with endless amounts of noise and false leads. By the end of the game, you feel like you have so much more information than you ever expected to get, and yet have even less of an idea what's really going on because of it.

This isn't a criticism. Prey manages to keep its story loosely organized despite how chaotic its organization is and how little solid information the player actually receives, and ultimately serves to further the narrative goals of the game. You aren't really supposed to piece together a strict timeline or lore book in your head. You're supposed to be confronted with an impossible decision that you have no real information about, one where your efforts to find answers only lead to more and more confusion and doubt.

By the end of the game it's nearly impossible to trust anyone as an ally, nor revile them as an enemy. Beyond that, you come to realize that it's impossible to know who you are in all of this -- it seems like nobody on Talos I is quite sure of who you are anymore, least of all yourself. Friends and coworkers comment on your personality shifting and talk about you in ways that don't make any sense, the people supporting or opposing the conflicting goals in the story all claim that you convinced them of that position, and a robot programmed to replicate your voice and personality openly questions whether it's actually representing your goals, or just whatever impression of yourself you could have left on a third party at the exact moment you programmed the thing.

There's ultimately no way to reason your way through any of this. You reach the end of the game, the final decisions you can possibly make, more confused than ever about what the correct answer could be. And, well, maybe there isn't a correct answer. Maybe you just have to do the best you can with what you think is right -- even if everybody else around you, including past versions of yourself, tell you you're making a mistake.

...But this isn't enough to overcome just how *boring* the game gets.

Gameplay wise, things are fairly open-ended and surprisingly flexible at all times. Considering one of the first things you pick up in this game is a gun that creates traversable platforms, this is clearly one of those games where you'll be rewarded for coming up with cool ideas. Facilitating this, your character starts off WEAK. To the extent you'll be afraid of literal coffee mugs and running away from even the weakest enemies in the game if you don't have an advantage in the fight -- your resources are scarce and non-regenerating, so even fights you win handily can sting badly.

And this works right up until Prey decides it wants to tell a story where you experience a meteoric rise in power, without giving your enemies much more to do. Well before the finale, you'll be basically kitted out and will be able to run around the map carelessly, and the best Prey can offer to resist you is elemental effects on enemies. These aren't done well, and all have specific weakness/strength matchups that basically give you three choices -- ignore them (which becomes surprisingly easy, and while ignoring your enemies should be possible in a good immersive sim, this is NOT the kind of game where ignoring your enemies is anything but horrifyingly boring,) trade off some extra health or ammo to deal with it, or play glorified rock-paper-scissors with tools that exist for no other reason than to play glorified rock-paper-scissors with elemental enemies.

Worse, the game of power-scaling and elemental advantage/disadvantage works to crowd out the game of gaining those advantages through creative thinking and on-the-fly improvisation. The joy of glancing an oxygen tank out of the corner of your eye, remembering where an active turret is, or just creating your own cover on a wall corner are all thrown out as these options become relatively less and less important as everything around it gets more and more powerful.

It never gets to a point where the game's actively unfun to play, but eventually every combat encounter comes with undertones of being annoyed or bored. The combat of Prey gets more mechanically complex as the game progresses, but because this replaces the dynamic complexity of emergent player behavior, it actually becomes less interesting once too many tools become available. It's because of this that Prey seems to really overstay its welcome in terms of runtime, and in my opinion the game would have been better served by being quite a bit shorter than it is, and the player kept MUCH more in check so you're not just carelessly resource-dumping in the last quarter of the game.

And that's the tragedy of Prey 2017. Like DXHR, it dips its toes into taking up the mantle of immersive sim gameplay but is so afraid of committing wholeheartedly to that idea that the gameplay ends up without anything to say for itself. It just turns into a slow DOOM, and Prey is so much worse off for it. It's fine, and that's all it is. And past the first few hours, it stops being a good example of an immersive sim, and becomes an example of how immersive sims go wrong.

For reference, started difficulty on Normal then bumped up to Hard after realizing I wasn't thinking anymore, and that didn't help at all. Playtime includes *several* times bouncing off the game and re-starting before forcing myself to finish

Par for the course with DICE's non-Battlefield titles of this era, yet another extremely flawed game that was nonetheless unbelievably important to the evolution of video games. Mirror's Edge is not the birthplace of structured movement tech but was the first notable success where endlessly chaining those building blocks together was the core mechanic and very much the point of the game. Despite several near-fatal missteps it remains a very important experience to this day.

if deus ex was made in a world where the concept of "conspiracy theory" stops existing because nobody believes anything at all anymore.

Okay but actually, this is a shockingly well-made im-sim that somehow strings together coherent and consistent design while going so far out of its way to violate convention that it often resists the player (though almost always in the way that it's laughing with you rather than at you.) That word choice was very specific by the way: despite violating convention at every turn, the "rules" of good design aren't violated -- that massive health blob is genuinely good UI aside from the sheer fact that it's unusual, and even setpieces and sections that seem asinine on first encounter put much more freedom and trust in the hands of the player to come up with unique solutions to problems that are otherwise well beyond edge-case territory in more standard shooters. Maybe I only feel this way because I have played far too many shooters for my own good, but Cruelty Squad is no joke one of the best shooters I have ever played

[Ignore my playtime: The launcher stayed open in the background for a few days.] It's mildly entertaining as sort of a "looter shooter" deal if you go into it with that mindset, and it is definitely a pretty game. That, and the whole "Bethesda walking simulator" specialty holds for a while. But Fallout 4 just fails on every other count.

First of all, I won't comment on the basebuilding system because I have absolutely zero interest in basebuilding, which also means I have no experience with which to judge Fallout 4's version of it.

As usual, Bethesda is not good at shooter mechanics. The actual shooting and combat is a MARKED improvement from previous titles, but the "unique weapon" system was replaced by randomly-rolled occasional drops and there just aren't enough weapons to actually make anything matter. Sure, the expanded weapon mod system keeps things fresh a little longer, but the upgrades are with very few exception just a straight line from worse to better equipment. This is not a new problem, but it's a shame that it's a problem that wasn't fixed when Fallout 4 leaned so heavily into the "Action" part of ARPG.

The environments are nice, something Bethesda is really quite good at, and I'm never exactly "bored" so much as "disinterested" when walking around really anywhere. Heck, many places in the game look downright good (we'll come back to this.) But after a while, the re-use of assets becomes too noticeable, sometimes extending to re-using entire structures or even blocks of them wholesale, and it pulls you out of this environmental immersion very jarringly when you notice this kind of reuse. The environments also don't help the fact that there just isn't much to actually do in several places aside from, well, look at the environments.

The absolute worst that Fallout 4 has to offer though is the complete lack of anything RPG in the game. Per usual for Bethesda, Fallout 4 spends the entirety of the game absolutely terrified that the player might make a mistake, misjudge a situation, or bring about some permanent consequence. Because of this, the player is never allowed to do anything that you "probably wouldn't want to do." There are several, SEVERAL "essential" NPCs that are entirely unkillable, quest lines often can't be failed even intentionally, and absolutely nothing about the dialogue matters in any capacity aside from occasionally getting a few extra caps on the side. At the very least, you CAN at least kill ||Shaun|| the moment you see him.

Accompanying this is the complete flanderization and dumbing-down of almost every kind of personality that exists in the wasteland. Super mutants (who are on the East coast for nebulous, handwaved reasons) are reduced to brainless, blithering idiots who do nothing but kill everything in sight. (The Brotherhood's depiction here has some... consistency issues, but only because Todd Howard explicitly stated that the game which justified and explained their presence and attitudes on the East coast didn't count). The Institute, who are intended to be the diet Enclave, have no actual motivations in the story, not even sheer self-interest. The Minutemen are nothing but a "good guy" pastiche, and have literally zero impact beyond being "your allies!" in certain quests. The Railroad, supposedly operating with extreme suspicion and secrecy, don't care at all how many times you tell them "I hate all of you, I hate what you stand for, and I will shoot any synth I see on sight" nor do they care how many synths you actually do shoot on sight. But hey, we get to combine buffout and mentats into, uh, bufftats, right? (For the record, Myron is a charlatan and his word alone is NOT sufficient proof Jet was a post-war drug)

Finally, for as good as the various environments look, Bethesda has yet again completely failed to consider what the setting of this game actually is. It's been over 200 years since the bombs fell. It's been over 100 years since the vault dweller emerged into the outside world. And in all this time, nobody's bothered to clean the rubble, empty cans, loose papers, splintered wood, or literal human skeletons out of the places they live? Literally everybody is still walking, talking, acting, dressing, conversing, commiserating like it's the 1950's USA, even though the bombs themselves didn't drop until 2077? Energy and plasma weapons, power armor, and vaults all existed well before the war, but the M1926A1 Thompson Submachine Gun is as far as technology got with conventional firearms? There's absolutely no sense to this world. Its rules and internal logic are already a really bad mangling and misunderstanding of the franchise's established rules, but they're then broken wantonly without a care at every design decision made so that they're not even internally consistent. I can't soften my opinion here, this is just lazy, awful writing. This very clearly is an attempt to reify the "post-apocalyptic" concept into something instantly recognizable, even if it makes no sense beyond the very surface level, just to cash in on broad appeal and brand name. And if Bethesda didn't want to be constrained by everything that had already been established by the Fallout universe, nobody was forcing them to make this a Fallout game at all. Well, okay, management was forcing them to make this a Fallout game, but nobody was forcing *them* to make that choice, and "it's actually somebody else's fault" doesn't mean the problem suddenly vanishes.

I don't mean to gatekeep the term "RPG," but it's very, very difficult to see how Fallout 4 could be an RPG or ARPG and isn't really just a shooter with skill trees. That doesn't make it a bad game. The fact that it so badly wants to be treated as an RPG and refuses to lean into its strengths in order to sell this watered-down idea of "an RPG" to a broad audience, and the consequences this has for everything else in the game, makes this a bad game.