Recent reviews by Cervantes

I think this is a decent game. Overall an improvement over Outer Worlds 1, and it has enough replayability that I'd not mind doing another playthrough later after the DLCs are released and the game is a bit more polished.

What I liked most was the exploration and combat, the game is vast and exploring is generally rewarded with some loot or lore. This is also helped by the game's visuals which are quite good, and with a bit of fiddling (downloading a mod to enable FrameGen and disabling hardware RTX with every other setting maxed out) it ran at a stable 90fps. The combat and gunplay felt nice, stealthing around and using the slowmo gadget to run in, shotgun people to the face and get out of dodge before they can react. I recommend max difficulty.

The companions themselves were very good, I liked their personnalities, dialogs and stories. I also liked that their gear evolves as you complete their missions and they definitely look cooler by the end of the game than Outer Worlds 1's companions. However gameplay-wise they are horrendous. They do very little damage, their AI is dumb especially for ranged companions, and they are basically only useful when using their special ability which for some reason only recharges while in combat. You also can't equip them at all outside of their passive skills and upgrades. As a result they are much weaker in a fight than in Outer World 1. Plus they don't give you any bonuses to skills, so generally speaking they are kinda useless outside of providing you with extra lives since as long as they're alive you can revive using trauma kits.

Finally the weakest part of the game in my opinion is the storytelling and choices. It is quite inconsistent : While the story itself is way more interesting than Outer Worlds 1 and there are some really interesting/funny dialogs, there are also some instances of dialogs and situations where the game doesn't acknowledge your actions and choices, and/or because you don't meet an arbitrary skill or dialog check an entire avenue of progress is blocked even though you did everything else to get that outcome and it going the other way doesn't make any sense. When I reached the end of the game one of the ending slides literally told me the afterstory of a major NPC I had actually killed after convincing him to stand down lol... I guess he got better ? Quite janky.

Overall I think Obsidian bit a little more than they could chew with this game, on top of some questionable game design decisions. Not enough for it to be plain bad but we are far from games like New Vegas or Pillars of Eternity. Compared to Avowed I'd say Outer Worlds 2 has better gameplay, much better companions and more content overall, but the storytelling and choices in-universe are weaker. A mixed bag then. Still, I recommend it as a capable enough Fallout-lite much like the first game was.

When compared to the previous entry in the series :

Pros : less cringe NPCs, great gameplay, decent content
Cons : pricey, abysmal performance for no reason, kinda lame playable characters (subjective, hard to beat Moze)

As it stands I would say it's on the exact same level as Borderlands 3. The slightly more palatable story is marred by the terrible performance (3080ti and 12900k in 1440p, game is playable with framegen but really shouldn't need that lol). The open world is a null factor, it plays well but doesn't feel much better than the regular old areas in BL3. Also I get the feeling that you have less narrated side quests due to the abundance of Far Cry-style open world content.

I recommended Borderlands 3 and I will recommend Borderlands 4, at its core it's still a really fun game to play. The thing is, you could mentally block out the cringe parts of BL3 and enjoy the rest of the game, it's much harder to mentally block out the 30fps feeling you get with framegen on... So be advised if you don't have a last gen computer.

This is a fantastic game whose only flaw is that it was made by 10 polish people in a basement with a budget equivalent to one Diablo 4 cash shop skin. And I mean absolutely no offense with that statement as they did an amazing job.

Yes there are places where the graphics look like they come straight from vanilla WoW, yes I ended my playthrough with my journal displaying one failed quest that I had in fact succeeded at by doing the objectives in the "wrong" order, yes there is a number of side stories and bits of content that look like they would be expanded upon but are left hanging and yes, Act 3 is clearly unpolished and of lower quality compared to the first two acts, both visually and in the writing.

But even with all that jank the gameplay and character progression are solid (although the game becomes very easy pretty quickly even on max difficulty), the main story and the majority of the side stories are well-written and interesting, the artistic direction is great and manages to make a lot of places and vistas impressive despite the technical limitations, the lore, ambiance and audio are excellent and the amount of content is more than correct for a game like that (my own very slow first playthrough took 95h).

If I had to compare this game to its most direct competitors Outer Worlds and Avowed I'd say the guys at Questline have managed to almost match Obsidian. Where both aforementioned games would get an 8/10, Fall of Avalon gets a solid 7 and a recommendation for any patient RPG fan who is okay with the fact that it's not quite a miraculous Dark Fantasy Skyrim out of nowhere...

As someone who had barely played Oblivion back in the day due to lack of time and bad PC I found this remaster excellent. Gorgeous landscapes while keeping the same old school feel (and jank). As far as just upgrading graphics on a great but visually dated game this is pretty much as good as it gets.

Besides that well, it's an old school Elder Scrolls game. Expect a bunch of caves, dungeons and ruins that will feel copypasted and copious amounts of jank. Expect absolutely unfair max difficulty and enemy scaling that can be tackled by abusing a wealth of equally unfair "mechanics" (and exploits) available to the player. And expect a lot of quests of varying quality, the main story not counting among the best ones but that's okay since you can play for over 150 hours exploring and doing other stuff anyway.

Out of the 3 Elder Scrolls games I've tried (Morrowind and Skyrim being the other two) I think that Oblivion is the lesser one. But it's still a legendary game I had a ton of fun in, and I think this remaster is a good occasion to experience it for the first time so I do recommend it for whoever has never (or barely) played it before. For more experienced Oblivion enjoyers looking for something new I would say wait for the Skyblivion mod which I heard will bring more new stuff to the table, like unreleased/unfinished content and such...

It's a good, immersive game. I played it much like I would any solo rpg with a survival/base building component on top and in 78h I've completed every quest the game had to offer and reached the second to last crafting tier, with my own hornycopter or whatever they're called.

The game's visuals and sounds are excellent, and make the initial discovery and exploration part of the game very good. If you're a fan of Dune stuff you will love it and recognize many NPCs and details, if you're like me kinda neutral towards it you'll still appreciate the aesthetics and vistas. Plus the game runs quite well and suffers from a miraculously low number of bugs and glitches considering it's made by Funcom.

I think the PvE gameplay was nicely done, with a variety of ways you can dispatch enemies, from the many combat skills you can pick from to using the game's verticality to approach from an advantageous angle. Enemy variety was a bit lacking though, but that's mostly due to the setting - no monsters or aliens to fight in Dune... The voice acting during the quests was good, the quests themselves were okay. The storylines were interesting but there was a LOT of back and forth between NPCs, and I say that as someone who played many MMORPGs and done many, many FedEx quests. You would expect people to have cellphones 100000 years in the future...

The whole crafting and base building thing is not exactly my cup of tea, I think it's well done but can get pretty discouraging especially the part before you get the flying vehicle is very brutal, those aluminium runs using only the little bike were a pain. The multiplayer aspect of the game forces you to maintain the base too, meaning you'll have to play regularly to pay taxes and keep the lights on. It's really not hard to do so but still, feels a bit like work lol. If you love base building and have many friends to play with that farm resources you can really go ham and build whole cathedrals and stuff. I was pretty happy with my small but functionnal shack.

I have not interacted with the PvP and politics part of the game, they do not interest me much and I don't see the game's PvP being particularly good or even remotely balanced, if the PvE is any indication lol. Politics will probably depend heavily on faction population and since there are only two of those anybody who has played faction-based PvP MMOs will know it will most likely end up badly lol. Plus the more you wait the worst it will get, since the Deep Desert is all about how many resources you're ready to throw at it to get rewards, so if you start late you're boned.

Anyway, I still recommend the game for solo/casual players that want a change of scenery from the classic fantasy/sci-fi and enjoy losing several hours of gameplay's worth of gear to an overgrown earthworm because your sandbike bugged out and flipped over and you got stuck below it.

This is a game that should not exist. It's not a completely terrible game, but it is a lazy, mediocre and greedy product compared to what From Software usually releases. For the same (!!!) asking price it should have been a second DLC for Elden Ring, on the same scale as Shadow of the Erdtree. Not a poor rogue-lite ersatz with barely 10% of the content, that pads its duration because theres 40 minutes of running around praying RNGesus between each try on one of the 8 final bosses...

In my opinion, this game creates a bad precedent for From Software. And the fact that with so little effort they get so much praise and success is worrisome. They've got our money because of how much good will they have garnered over the years releasing awesome games, I hope they don't let it go to their heads and become the next Blizzard, or Ubisoft, or EA...

Is it a good game ? Yes. The graphics, quality of life and gameplay have never been better, at least from my limited PC-only experience (only played World and Rise). That's why I recommend it if your PC can run it, it's objectively good. Yet I personally like it less than World or Rise in its current state.

Now I don't know how World and Rise were at release because I played them 1 year late on PC but right now in 50h I feel like I've breezed through all there is to do and the only thing left is farming the one highest difficulty monster (which really isn't that difficult) repeatedly to get decorations.

New monsters are already planned to arrive soon-ish and considering the huge success updates will surely keep pouring in, but right now I'm left feeling a little disappointed... it probably comes down to me starting to know my way around Monster Hunter games, maining Gunlance which is very strong in Wilds (but poorly balanced and thus lacking variety), and the current content being tailored more towards newer players. I'm left wanting more which is both a good and bad thing I guess.

Oh and the story was complete ass, which is usual for Monster Hunter, but it felt slightly worse than World or Rise, mostly due to a lot of unlikeable characters and some nonsensical dialogs... The final boss cutscene was excellent though, and the environments are so beautiful that the discovery experience makes up for the writing overall. Besides the story is really just the tutorial like in previous games so it's over in 10ish hours.

To sum up I think the game is a very solid base for much needed additional content. I am confident that by the time the expansion comes out it will be on or above the level of its predecessors.

I think this is a good game. It looks great, runs well, the exploration is pleasant, the combat gameplay is okay (better than in similar games at any rate), the dialogues and choices are actually quite good (I loved the ending I was able to get) and the world building works (mostly because it's Pillars of Eternity and kinda requires you to have played Pillars 1 & 2 to get all the references).

Its main flaws is that it lacks depth as far as game mechanics go : character and companion abilities progression and synergies are pretty mediocre, and even though you can easily respec the upgrade system for weapons will force you to specialize fairly early on. Also enemy variety is lacking and the game is very easy even on max difficulty especially if you play a range build (I went with dual pistols) you can cheese every encounter lol.

At the end of the day it's a fine Elder Scrolls-lite much like Outer Worlds was a fine Fallout-lite. The game has clearly been tailored for a more casual audience which I get is disappointing to old Pillars of Eternity RPG veterans. It's very much a pretty-looking exploration game with some combat and story decisions sprinkled on, and if you like that style it will keep you busy and entertained for 70+ hours easily so I'd say it's worth its price.

From what I can tell after having played the game since beta this is shaping up to be the best ARPG on the market, for discerning gamers.

If you want quick fun for a week then be done until next season or expansion Diablo 3 or 4 will do it just fine. If you want hundreds of hours of gruelling progression, learning experiences and accomplishments, PoE 2 is by far the better option.

Now the hype around the game is massive and some people will be disappointed. It's not for everyone : you may hit boss walls and other frustrations, gearing is slow, body block is a deadly thing and skills can feel weak. There are always options to keep going forward though even if they are quite few and far between as it currently stands. The game is very much in Early Access and is missing a lot of classes, weapons and gems.

Personally, the only definitive flaw I find is the globally unique character names. Trivial for most people since roleplay isn't the focus of the game at all but considering the litteral million of people playing across all platforms right now it might turn some people off to be forced to use some weird character name that breaks their immersion because they were not there in the first 3 seconds after the servers opened... A problem that could have been easily solved by displaying only the unique account ID in chat/party UI and letting people name their toons however they want without worries : one of the few things Blizzard did better with D4 in my opinion.

With that said, the price of entry into this quite unique experience right now is very low and faith in the developers is well warranted. An easy recommendation.

All right. I've 100% one playthrough, took me about 100 hours losing a lot of time listening to/reading everything and reloading some dialogs because I wasn't satisfied with my character's lines. I will say this : Everything bad that's been said about the game is true.

The game is peppered with weak, cringy dialogs, random woke insertions (especially bad if you don't play in English and they also butcher your language for non-binary pronouns or somesuch...) and a weird, at times almost cartoony art direction that clashes with the Dragon Age style we know. It's bad and disappointing and almost enough to ruin the whole game.

Now the reason why I still recommend it is because much like Borderlands 3, the cringy parts aren't quite enough to outweigh the genuine qualities of the game : The gameplay is fun (I absolutely recommend max difficulty though otherwise it will be way too simple), the synergies between items, talents, skills and companions are quite rich and interesting, the environments are gorgeous and varied (and the game runs pretty well too even with RTX on) and the story and content themselves are actually very good, it's just the presentation that's lacking at times.

To summarize, if you've played and appreciated every Dragon Age game up until now and you are interested in visiting places mentionned only in the lore, understanding overarching plot points and seeing how the story ends then yes, I recommend Veilguard. I personally enjoyed enough of my time in it.

But if you are a diehard Origins fan that hated DA2 and Inquisition then this game sure won't change your mind, because it is even worse than those previous two in many aspects. You can pass and keep praying for Origins 2 or the Rapture, whichever is more likely to happen first...