Seneste anmeldelser af Geon106

I remember playing Oblivion back in 2006 on PC and remember how much of a step forward it was from Morrowind graphically. Unfortunately going back to Oblivion now it has not aged great. So I am very grateful for this remaster. That said, calling it a remaster I feel is doing it a dis-service. It is more of a remake given it's in a brand new engine (UE5). Unlike say the Definitive Edition of GTA III/VC/SA, this is not simply upscaled textures.

Graphically this looks great and runs well too (I'm running on Ubuntu 24.02, AMD 5900X, 7900XT, 32GB RAM) with the graphics maxed out. The audio is brilliant. The iconic soundtrack has been left alone but ambient sounds have been given an overhaul. The NPC characters have improved a lot though their conversations are still stuck somewhat in the uncanny valley.

The quests have been left mostly untouched it seems in which case much like the original, the main quest is fairly weak and short. But, of course like any Elder Scrolls game the real stories are in the side quests rather than the main quest. The Oblivion sections still interest me very little but they are at least now a lot less plain to look at.

If you haven't played Oblivion before or have not played in 15+ years then this is a good chance to have an amazing adventure in this great world. Yes the price is fairly high, but again this is closer to a remake than a remaster.

Probably the best game in the C&C franchise! I have fond memories of playing many skirmishes on the map May Day. This takes me back to my early teen years. Also the soundtrack is phenomenal.

At -60% off this game caught my eye and seemed well reviewed. I was in the mood for something funny and light-hearted. The humour in this is very cheesy and cliché, but enjoyable.

I'm only an hour in thus far but it definitely feels good value (at least at this discounted rate), it's not too difficult and is fairly well put together. I am unsure how well some of the references will age mind you.

I've only played for 13 hours so this is purely an early game review. So far though I have fairly mixed thoughts.

The good:
There is a strong foundation here for a worthy sequel to C:S1. The simulation itself seems solid and the tools right out of the box seem great. Traffic is far easier to manage now with far superior path-finding compared to the previous entry. I also appreciate that out of the box we get day/night cycle, disasters and a number of transportation options. Previously these arrived after release or with expansions. The UI is nicely laid out and I do appreciate all maps having seasons and all weather types. The XP progression system is also nice though could make do with being a bit more fleshed out.

The bad:
I seem to have been lucky in terms of performance, maxed out settings at 1440p my machine (GPU: 7900XT. CPU: 5900X. RAM: 32GB DDR4) seems to handle it fine. However, the graphics do not seem a huge improvement over the previous title despite nearly a decade passing. It is not a bad looking game, but I expected a bit more of a leap. That aside, one area that needs improving is how the landscape is flattened when placing buildings, it is quite ugly and jarring. There is also a lack of map variety and certain game mechanics don't seem as deep or are absent, for example no heating to worry about for when it snows?

I suspect in time after a number of patches and some DLC etc this game will leap past CS1. Right now it is solid, if not revolutionary. That said, it was always going to be difficult bringing a game out to compare to a predecessor that has nearly 10+ years worth of patches and expansions, but I do think a few more months of tweaking and adding some extra variety etc would have been better.

I will update this review once I have put some more hours into the game

My first proper experience with an MMO was World of Warcraft which I started back in 2006. That was a game I really cherished and enjoyed right up until Cataclysm came out. It was when that expansion released I first realised the ship had sailed for WoW and it had peaked. The sense of wonder and adventure gone, the reward for hard work tarnished. Then when Kung Fu Panda aka Mists of Pandaria came out I realised my WoW days were behind me. I did try a few times since going back to it but the game is very different now in terms of the overal experience whilst being very dated in some of the gameplay.

However, as a fan of The Elder Scrolls games, Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) caught my eye when first announced and was a no-brainer purchase back in 2014. So a friend and I on the day of launch jumped on together. To begin with, it was a mixed bag. The game was very polished overall especially for an MMO at launch. It had a lot of quality of life improvements that WoW definitely needed whilst having a large dense world to explore. However, that is where it fell down at the time. It was quite natural to come to ESO wanting an experience like the previous Elder Scrolls games albiet with friends. The downside with this is ESO was very much like other MMOs with zones with set levels meaning you could not go off and explore at will. It made it feel more grindy and linear. This put me off, for a time.....

Fast forward to 2021 and I decided it was time for a new MMO, I recently tried WoW Classic but it wasn't going to cut it. So I looked at what was the most popular MMOs and highest reviewed to narrow down to a small selection. I will be honest, I went straight for ESO with my love of The Elder Scrolls series as strong as ever. I started a new character and well, a month and a half later I have got the character up to Level 50 (CP220) with maxed crafting and a large manor house. I can honestly say I will not be playing any other MMOs in the near future. So let me break down the current world of ESO and why I choose to call it my home.

--- Graphics ---
Despite the game being 7 years old, ESO looks really good. It runs great even on modest hardware (my laptop from 2015 runs it super smooth on a mix of Medium/High settings at 1080p. It has a 4th gen i7, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA 970m GPU). On my desktop cranked up to max the game really looks fantastic. The water looks superb, the world feels lush and detailed. Character models look great even up close. It must be said the newer expansions definitely do show where the Zenimax have pushed the engine further, Summerset looks stunning especially during sunrise/sunset.

--- Sound ---
Sound-wise it is a big of a mixed bag. The sound design and sound effects are in general superb. Hearing a thunderstorm roll in overhead as the sound of the first rain start to fall truely is atmospheric. With voiced NPCs including quests it really makes the story and lore of the world come alive. However, there are a few ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The first gripe is often you will hear NPCs repeat themselves when you walk near them, this can become quite tedious to hear the same lines spoken again and again.

What about the music? Well the music is very good but I would say it isn't as memorable as the music from Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim. The music is good, but you probably wouldn't be wanting to listen to it after your game session has ended. I think this is something that WoW has down is a fantastic soundtrack though maybe partly helped by nostalgia.

--- Gameplay ---
Gameplay wise ESO is very welcoming to new players with a great tutorial that walks you through each game mechanic whilst still leaving certain parts of the game left to discover on your own. It strikes a good balance between hand-holding to get you going whilst not spoiling every single game mechanic that you will stumble upon yourself. Now unlike when the game first launched, the world scales with the player. This is fantastic for PvE as you can do what quests you want where you want or explore as you want. It really is fantastic especially if you want to go and explore or find treasures. The downside to this (depending on your perspective) is you cannot grind to level yourself up beyond the area you are in to make the game a bit easier. Likewise, you cannot have a high level player boost low level players through dungeons as the difficulty will scale. You can solo dungeons at very high levels (depending on your gear/class and which dungeon). However, the game isn't about grinding to top level. It's about enjoying the stories within, doing these in any order in any zone is great.

Overall though the game focuses more on story telling and exploration than other MMOs like WoW. You will rarely find a quest where your objective is to kill 15 enemies of one type or to kill a number of enemies in the hope of an item dropping. No, ESO is very much a case of "here is the world of Tamriel, go have an adventure". The difficulty in questing is also quite a bit easier. You will rarely find yourself in a field pulling several mobs at once, ESO just isn't built like this. You will not find hundreds of enemies in a field close together. However should anything go wrong and you find yourself dead, it is not a big deal. You can either use a filled soul gem to resurrect on the spot (soul gems are very easy to find, by level 50 you will have a few hundred) or resurrect at wayshrines which are fast travel points. Really it is not a big deal.

Talking of wayshrines, in ESO you do not wait to travel from one zone to another and pay to do so. Instead, you go to a wayshrine which are scattered around the zones and can teleport from one wayshrine to another (or to your home) free of charge instantly. You can teleport from anywhere to a wayshrine but this does cost some gold.

What about crafting? Crafting in ESO is a bit more in-depth than WoW but is a lot more involved in a good way. You can choose how you want your items to look, you can use dyes on clothing to change their colour, you can craft furniture for your player home etc. It really is impressive. You can also do any crafting, unlike WoW you are not limited to two. If you want to max level your clothing, jewelcrafting, blacksmithing etc etc you can. Or you can choose to focus and go all in one a few of them. It is up to you.

As you can tell by now, ESO is about telling a good story and having a good adventure without anything getting in your way or making it a grind. I'd say levelling is a bi-product in ESO of you enjoying the world around you rather than everything being a race to max level like other MMOs.

--- Conclusion ---

There is really too much to do in ESO to go into detail. For anyone wanting to know if the game is worth getting, absolutely! You do not need to pay a monthly fee (though ESO+, the monthly subscription, is worth it), you can just pay for the game and if you wish any of the expansions after and play! So it really is less of an investment and it is nice knowing if you are not going to play for a few months you will not be charged.

You do not need to have played the previous games or read the lore etc. Though The Elder Scrolls universe does reward those who do with an a world that truly feels lived in and fleshed out. But if you want to ignore all of that and treat quests as self-contained stories then you will still have fun, but this is game that is best not rushed through instead lose yourself in its world and lore.

There is just so much to do in ESO. PvE, PvP, Guilds, Crafting, Player Housing, Exploration, Dungeons(both 4-man or Solo which are called Delves), Trials(Raids), amazing stories, hugely in-deph lore with a world fully fleshed out since the first Elder Scroll title back in the mid-90s. If you are a fan of the series you should already have this game, if you want an MMO and WoW is not for you, then this is definitely the best alternative unless you enjoy lots of grinding.

After completing this game multiple times getting multiple endings over NG+ on my PS Vita, I had to get it on PC. I'm not normally a fan of turn based combat nor JRPGs as most are terrible. However, Persona 4 doesn't have lots of normal JRPG tropes compared to others. However what really pulled me in is the characters and the storyline. Plus not to mention fantastic sound design and music, the voice acting is superb.

The characters are all (bar a few exceptions) very interesting and relatable with fantastic character arcs. The main storyline is engrossing yet not over the top (again like some JRPGs). The story line whilst fantastical is quite grounded borrowing a lot of the works from Carl Jung, as you can expect from the very title of the game.

In terms of this port to PC, it is very solid. I have had no crashes or issues at all. The graphics look as good as ever, I mean this was originally a PS2 release. It plays just how you would expect it to and delivers a as much of a good experience as the Vita version.

I'm only 9 hours in currently, but can see myself completing it at least once again on PC.

21-25FPS at 1280x800 or 5FPS running at my monitors native 2560x1440... Even though the Geforce 1080 can now support RTX, doesn't mean it should! - As for the game it does look really nice so if you want an excuse to replay Quake 2, this is it.

I have been building PCs for a good 20 years now so came to PC Building Simulator being able to jump straight in, and that is good. It is intuitive and for the most part makes sense. It certainly is fun to experiment with different parts to build various machines and also to try and run your own PC repair shop. The latter is very much akin to Car Mechanic Simulator right down to the tightening of screws and so forth.

It is very easy to pick up and even anyone who has never built a computer would very quickly pick up what needs to be done. However it is not entirely realistic. It is more of a dumbed down simplified simulator. For example, the game did not seem to penalise me or impact a computers score which DIMM slot I put RAM into, so it was a waste of time always trying to put it in the correct channel.

I have played for about 10 hours and so far there is also no worry about formatting hard drives, setting up RAIDs, no drivers to worry about, you don't need to connect any front panel connectors etc etc.

I am also dissapointed by the overal lack of parts. I went into freeplay to see if I could replicate my own computer but realised there was a lack of:

- No soundcards so I could not put in my Soundblaster XE-5 or other soundcard to represent it
- No NICs
- No Quadro graphics cards despite many in-game customers wanting computers for rendering
- There are a fair few PC parts but still feels lacking, for example the largest hard drive is 4TB?! There is also a lack of CPU options and very restrictive when it came to Micro-ATX/ITX builds

One other complaint is when you have a PC with an unknown issue that has to be diagnosed, the game does not let you do this how you would in the real world. For example I had a PC which was not powering on, first step was to put in another PSU as a temporary substitute to rule out the PSU, but the game would not let me do this instead stating "Must use the customers original part". It turns out this was because it was a dead motherboard, but I would prefer the game to let us troubleshoot in a realistic way rather than a "this part cannot be changed for another so must be working" way of thinking.

But despite being simplied and missing many steps when it comes to building computers and the lack of expected PC components, it is a very enjoyable well put together game. You can have internet radio playing or your own music/podcast which makes it ideal to zone out and relax.

For this reason I would recommend the game. I do hope they bring out a "Retro" or "Vintage" DLC pack with things like Socket A, or Socket 5 or a Slot 1 motherboards with AWE32/SB16 cards and Voodoo graphics cards etc for example would be great. Installing a DOS like OS on a 486 would be bliss.

A really good, fun game that is surprisingly in depth. If you are a fan of Animal Crossing then this will scratch that same itch.

Being in charge of a farm you get full run to build your farm, customise your home and explore the world. You get the same Animal Crossing/Harvest Moon tropes such as romance and relationships.

It's a game you can either dive into for a quick 10 minutes or spend a few hours playing.

I would say this is a good casual game. One ideal for chilling on the sofa and play on your TV via Steam Link to relax after a hard day at work.

Now I am 3 hours into the game I now wish to write a preliminary review. For context, I played the original Skyrim on day of release back in 2011 and have continued to play it on and off since. This has always been modded.

The Elder Scroll games are probably my favourite game series. Certainly top 5. They may not always be the most immersive but are always full of content and things to do. I love how open ended they are, don't want to do the main quest? That's fine. Want to roleplay as a thief? A travelling merchant? Sure. Throw in a huge amount of lore and what you have is an excellent RPG experience.

When I heard that Skyrim was being released for VR, it was a no brainer. A game I love in VR which I love. A great mix. Plus given it's age it should run fine at 90FPS.

I was right to be excited, Skyrim VR is Skyrim like before but in a way you have not experienced before. After getting a 3D monitor in 2013, I did not want to go back to "Flat" Skyrim, now I do not want to go to non-VR. I will cut the next part of this review into sections just to make it easier to read.

Graphics:

Given its age Skyrim VR does not look that bad. It certainly is not as good as a smaller, enclosed game made for VR sure, but when you consider it is 7 years old and is huge, I have no complaints. To put that into perspective, 7 years before Skyrim released in 2011, Far Cry came out. Try going back to that gem!

When I started the game the graphics were set to Medium, given I am running this on an i5 6600K and Asus Strix 1080 I turn the settings up to max, the game ran smooth as silk and now looks good. I will consider putting mods on at some point mind you, but I will want to maintain a great framerate as a priority.

Controls:

To begin with the controls took me some getting used to, however after an hour or two I was flicking through menus, changing gear on the fly. There are some weird oddities I need to get used to such as:

- Not sure how to exit from the map without fast travelling somewhere?
- Dismounting from my horse can be a bit finnicky
- Riding a horse takes a bit of getting used to, I can only get my horse to "run", not sprint(normally there was an option for walk, run and sprint)

I imagine the above may just be where I need to get used to the game. The rest of the controls feel great.

Combat:

This is a bit of a mixed bag. Melee combat is okay, nothing amazing. Certainly do not expect the melee combat to be as good as say Vanishing Realms. However I am willing to be very allowing in this regard, we have to remember this was not a VR project but was adapted. Archery and magic, well, now that is where the combat in VR really shines! The first time I used a bow, I managed to hit an enemy quite far away first time (though it was beginners luck as my shots miss more than they hit), the feeling was great! Likewise using magic with your hands is very immersive.

Gameplay:

This is a great way to see Skyrim even if you have played it several times before. If you own a VR headset and you are a fan of the series, it is a no brainer. I'm enjoying playing the game properly(no cheats) and taking my time, so far I am loving it.