Recent reviews by Stormy

[At a friend's request, I'm currently giving Prey another shot. Obviously whatever problems I had before either aren't there or aren't enough to stop me from having fun now, but I want to hold off on rewriting this until I've seen more. I will say now though that the game takes A WHILE to actually get going and let you see something interesting, and if it wasn't for the insistence of people whose opinions I trust I'd have never figured that out.]

Whatever's going on with this game, I just can't make myself like it. And it's not that I don't like immersive sims (VTMB and Deus Ex [1] are incredible, Mankind Divided was pretty good and Human Revolution... exists and is okay... the Thief series is really good, so on and so forth,) it's not that I don't like games with weird takes on first-person shooting (Rainbow six mostly, plus SWAT 4,) games that can be arduously slow (Chaos Theory, Thief once again, you get it) or Arkane's own offerings (Dishonored, specifically Daud's DLCs to this day remains my GOAT)

But... Prey just seems to me like it's taking the *worst* pieces of those puzzles and putting out an end result that just doesn't feel like a game where anything works together.

Sure, the premise is interesting. I get faked out and realize I'm completely alone and have no real idea what's going on, excited to uncover what's up... until i'm reading my thirtieth email down this corridor, no closer to answering any interesting questions but now with several uninteresting ones polluting the narrative.

The cold, empty, desolate atmosphere communicates the grim fate of a desperate and dying population thrown into chaos and paranoia... until I'm revisiting the same scenes hours later with absolutely nothing new to glean from it in between trips to various rooms all wrecked in nearly-identical ways.

Not being able to trust that your surroundings are free from enemies fills you with the same paranoia and unease that must've plagued the previous inhabitants... until you're wrench-checking every prop in the room to clear out a nuisance that will nonetheless take half your health bar if you don't do this.

Coming across unfamiliar enemies, or familiar enemies in unfamiliar settings, puts you in the position of not only needing to come up with a creative plan, but a creative backup too... until you reload the fight ten times because you haven't settled on *the* correct way to counter this enemy type, before treating every situation like the job's to set up the same circumstances that you know will solve the problem. Or, heaven forbid, you realize the problem's actually just a contrivance of scripting, and this is in fact a set piece you're supposed to play "like a video game".

Everything, *everything* I do in this game, I come out of it feeling relieved. Not because I just had a brush with death that I'm glad I got away from, but because there's now less of the game standing between me and playing the rest of the game.

The gloo gun is really, really cool, and I love the ability to traverse in interesting ways with it. And that's about it.

I'm sure Prey is a perfectly fine game and a perfectly fine immersive sim at that. For the life of me, I can't seem to be anything but bored and annoyed actually trying to get through it.

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

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. Also, ignore my playtime: I accidentally left the launcher open in the background for a few days.

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.

It's been nothing but a tech demo for 15 years and that's not going to change. However it is bundled with what is probably one of the most mechanically-innovative first-person shooters released in the past 20 years, so I don't regret buying this strangely enough.

The learning curve is a brick wall and almost no attempt is made to explain how the game works. I simply will not take the risk of going beyond the refund window on the chance it'll finally click.

As somebody who absolutely, positively, cannot stand anything that even resembles the game Rogue, Balatro is one of two rogue(like/light) games I enjoy. And it's incredible (even if I SUCK at it)

Tell the world, let 'em know that Computer RPGs are not dead yet. In a sea of first person shooters with dialogue trees, dead and empty sandboxes with no meaningful interactions, endless floods of the same fetch quest in 200 different locations, and levels linear and boxed-in enough to trigger claustrophobic panic, there are still independent developers absolutely embarrassing AAA publishers in even the most basic game design decisions.

Can't wait for the HBomberGuy video on this game, coming to stores near you in 40 years' time.

Scenario: a giant corporation has asked you, their highly-augmented and extremely-recognizable chief of security, to go to a police station and steal a processor from a cadaver's head. The cadaver is part of a top-secret, highly-restricted case, and you are not allowed anywhere near it. You tried telling the boss that this is a stupid idea and you won't stand for it, but the game's having you do it anyways despite giving you the illusion of the choice to reject this course of action.

You walk into the police station, go to the front desk, and ask to see the cadaver. A man at the front desk says you're absolutely not allowed even beyond the lobby. You tell him it is not his fault he shot a child. He lets you through without a second thought. Everybody else in the building magically forgets you are not allowed to be there, and takes no issue with you opening up the cadaver's head and yanking something out, then leaving with it. There are no consequences for doing this.

This time, you enter the police station and immediately throw a grenade in the lobby, killing cops and civilians in plain view. You then proceed to methodically massacre the entire police force at the building, with very loud gunshots and explosions and stabbings right in front of security cameras and windows. You exit the building and the cops standing right outside the door do not care at all. You kill them too, and a few civilians in random places for good measure. There are no consequences for doing this, and the game proceeds entirely identically to the previous scenario.

This time, you enter the police station several floors up from the very obvious fire escape entrance. You click on a vent and walk through it. It takes you to a door, and you play a minigame (meaning you're not playing Deus Ex) for a full minute. The locked door opens and takes you to another vent. That vent takes you to another locked door. That locked door takes you to another vent. That vent takes you to the cadaver. You leave the way you came in. There are no consequences for doing this, and the game proceeds entirely identically to the previous scenario.

It's absolutely appalling that critics thought this was some once-in-a-generation gem of game design and a true return to immersive sim gameplay when you can't even pretend that you're doing anything for a reason or that anything you're doing even matters anyways.