Recent reviews by Geon106

A very good concept, one that should work great, especially if VR is added.

However, this game is let down by a toxic community and a lack of any good quality content. It is more an open mic night for trolls rather than anything meaninful. Which is a shame as the concept is very good.

Coming up for my first seven hours playing this game at time of writing. To begin with, this is not a pick up and play RPG in the way any modern Elder Scrolls game is. This game is very much more grounded. There is no magic or magical creatures. What you do get is a fairly accurate simulation of life in the Bohemia empire in the 1400's. In fact many of the big characters in the game are based on real historical figures and so far the game seems historically accurate in the events long passed. Again though, I am only seven hours in so not sure how closely it will follow history. Also as I mentioned, it is a fairly accurate simulation of history, but maybe not quite as brutal and diseased as it probably was, though let's not make the game harder!

Which brings us onto difficulty, this game is not as easy to fluke as games like Skyrim. I would actually say in some respects combat is more akin to the older Thief games in respect you are often out numbered and out-gunned. Your character is weak. This I think is superb though. Instead of you being the highest member of every guild, a prophet, a top swordsmen etc, you are but a blacksmith's son. Yes, you can improve your character but you will never be virtually invincible. Battles are tough, the enemies are brutal. But, be patient and you will get good at fighting. The combat mechanics whilst frustrating to get the grips of to begin with end up being a huge joy once mastered.

Again, your character is weak and so do not go in to every battle swords at the ready. To put it into perspective, your character cannot even read.

The characters though are all very likeable. I rarely get invested in characters in most games but here they are all fantastic. The voice acting is extremely well delivered even by minor characters, though the minor characters do tend to repeat the same lines sometimes but that's not a huge issue. Not a huge issue in comparison to other large RPG games that is for sure.

The story has me gripped and I cannot wait to dive back in and see where it goes. The story aside though, the world itself is in my opinion the biggest appeal of this game. It helps this game looks fantastic but it's beyond the graphics, the sound, the NPCs - Just the general atmosphere. This game has so much "presence". You can stop and take a screenshot almost anywhere and it would look like a photo of a living world. Anyone who plays this would do themselves well to listen on a good pair of headphones or a good surround sound system.

This game is probably in my top 5 all time RPG games which is saying something, it certainly is my favourite one since Skyrim. I prefer this to Witcher 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition to name a few. Alas, all is not perfect with this game. There are at time of writing a few bugs. The most prominent one I have encountered is the game will freeze for a few moments every so often, normally when leaving a cutscene or just after loading the game. It does not happen often enough or long enough to be a game breaker and the game is only a few days old since full release so I can overlook this. Other issues are very minor such as NPCs have textures missing. Not textures missing as in a fallback texture in it's place, I mean some NPCs will only have a texture down to just below their neck and then you will be able to look through them to their clothing on their backs. I hope the developers fix this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ though, they've already achieved so much.

Bugs are to be expected with a large game world with a lot going on though, the developers have done a great job here and there is nothing game breaking. I have not experienced any crashes and running this game on Very High settings at 1440p on an ASUS Strix 1080 paired with 16GB of RAM and a 6600k i5 yields a framerate ranging from 40-50 in large towns to 50-60 average outside of very built up areas. The frame rate has never been an issue which is impressive given the amount going on.

I think this game is well worth buying and I cannot wait to finish it but also see what else the developers do with it, hopefully there will be some expansions and such at a later date. Anyone who is a an RPG fan or even anyone who enjoys the medieval time period would love this. I highly recommend it..

The only word I can describe this is profound.

This is an amazing experience/tool and really shows what VR can do beyond gaming. Being able to view anywhere in the world in VR and move your head/body to look at buildings in all different angles, go on tours, use StreetView etc is all fantastic.

As usual this is a whole lot of content/data for the price of 0 thanks to Google.

I cannot recommend this highly enough, it makes a great demo to show your friends/family but is also great for listening to relaxing music or a podcast and just exploring. I do wish Google could add a way of giving you facts about a city/building etc so you could lliterally have a virtual tour, but that's no loss in the grand scheme of things.

This is ideal if you have family members who used to love travelling but now cannot due to health reasons or even just money. It's not as good as the real thing, but when you cannot do the real thing this is as "real as it gets".

This is a must have for anyone with a Vive/Rift. You can use it to watch YouTube/Netflix/Amazon/Stored videos in a huge array of enviroments. My personal favourite is big screen cinema. It feels like you are in a real cinema.

It is the best way of watching videos in VR in my opinion. It also supports 3D videos both locally and streamed which is a huge bonus.

Beyond videos you can also use this to control your computer. For example using the VR controllers or your real keyboard/mouse. I tried to use it to play some non-VR games but Steam rather predictably closes Virtual Desktop to launch your game so it will not serve that purpose.

Well worth the asking price. Vive Video is good for free, but this is miles better for a small price.

A must for the Disney fans. However do not expect more than 15-30 minutes of content. The content is lacking, the only good experiences are the two for the Jungle Book, though they are very short but are of good quality for the price of free.

I do wish Disney would add more. I would happily pay a bit if there was several 360/3D videos just like the Jungle Book ones, let alone any interactive content.

There is a lot of potential here but it is sad it has not had an update in over a year. Worth trying for free so for that I give it a recommendation, the Disney fans will enjoy what is here but alas will want more. So please take this as a recommendation assuming you have managed your expectations.

As a fan of L.A. Noire since it's first release on Xbox 360 and then again on PC, I was really curious about the VR edition. I did however have some reservations. Firstly was it just L.A. Noire but wrapped for VR or a full remake? The reason I queried this is because the only part of the game that I could see working really well in VR was looking at clues and such. Oh how wrong I was to worry. After my first hour or so in the game I thought I'd come tell you all of my thoughts

Rockstar has made L.A. Noire a fantastic VR experience. It controls great, it looks great especially given how old the game actually is, the gun play is fun and audio is brilliant.

If you've played L.A. Noire then this doesn't bring much to the table, it takes a handful of cases from the main game but with some VR mechanics. I'd like more cases but I am sure Rockstar will release updates in the future should this sell well. The driving, looking at queues and asking questions etc is all recreated here.

Playing in VR is very immersive, honestly Rockstar have done a great job and making you feel like you are in this game world. Looking down an alleyway for clues and using your flashlight feels great.

The game also runs great too. I managed to crank the settings right up and my i5 6600K/Asus Geforce 1080 machine was quite happy.

The only issue I encountered was in one of the first missions I ran out of ammo and could not work out how to get more ammo so had to get shot to restart again. This may have been an error on my part but could not find any way of getting more ammo, reloading had no effect.

For £24.99 I highly recommend this game to L.A. Noire fans who own a HTC Vive and if you have not played L.A. Noire then this still makes a great addition to your library. It's also pretty good even for new players especially when you have completed the game and can pick 'n' choose the cases to repeat them.

Okay, so let's be honest this is pretty much just an emulator frontend. However, it is a fantastic emulator frontend.

I came across this game actually looking for arcade games, saw this was a VR experience in a virtual arcade and wanted to try it. Then realised it is an emulator. That is no bad thing, in fact the idea of having actual real arcade cabinets, a SNES, GB games etc in a 3D enviroment that is very customisable is incredible.

I spent a few hours getting a load of cabinets working, some YouTube videos for the in game cinema / tv etc etc. There were a few hurdles, namely a couple of crashes with video files, the in-game Gameboys screens having to be viewed at very specific angles to show etc. But, I have to say overall this is fantastic.

It is worth saying you do not need a VR headset to play this game, it works fine without and is still very enjoyable. However if you own a VR headset then this game is a must.

Aside from the emulation, there are some mini-games in the 3D enviroment you can play such as bowling, whack-a-mole and other similar arcade games.

Oh and also, one fun thing to do in this game is have 80's or 90's music playing throughout your arcade and have all of your games era-specific. So for example my arcade is based in the early 90's, when the games of the later 80's were still available but 3D games started to emerge. Of course the choice is up to you and you could have a present day arcade if you wanted, Mario Kart DX Arcade anyone?

So the TL:DR of it all is, this game is well worth buying if you like emulation and especially so if you own a VR headset though that isn't a requirement..

Over the past week, city building fans have waited patitently for what they were hoping to be the definitive city builder since SimCity 4. Unfortunately the opinions of players has been mixed at best. So is Cities XXL better than Cities XL or worse in every way? We have heard people say this is just a re-branding of an old game, so we decided to find out for ourselves.

Cities XL first launched in 2009 and was a spiritual successor to City Life. The game offered expansive landscapes in which to build your dream city along with online capabilities (long before SimCity). However this did not live up to expectations, the online was a flop, the game suffered from poor optimization such as only using one core on multi-core systems and various memory leaks. Despite this, fans of the series have remained loyal. Despite its faults, Cities XL has offered a very fluid and flexible city building game.

When Cities XXL was announced, it was detailed to have an all new engine, more low-level micro-management and various improvements including to performance. These alone should make it a worthy upgrade or entry point for a budding city builder.

Well the first thing we questioned is the games engine. It is possible this is a new engine under the hood, but on the surface it looks very much the same engine as before. Graphically the game looks the same, albeit with a new black UI. The controls work much the same way and the menus are largely the same. So on the surface at least, the engine seems to have been tweaked rather than fully re-worked from the ground up.

Performance wise, this game is far better. Our city of 425k inhabitants is still as smooth as when we started. In Cities XL Platinum, a similar sized city we had suffered from terrible frame rates and choppiness at this point. The UI is also more responsive than before. We did encounter some minor graphical glitches, mostly that at night, streetlights would illuminate a grid beneath them. But nothing game breaking.

There are some new buildings to place in your city, like a pollution sensor and an eco-car dealer. There are not enough with too little function to add much weight behind a new game release, but welcome additions.

Talking of pollution, this has been greatly tweaked and works more the way you would expect. It makes more sense than ever before to ensure your industry is far from residential areas, where as before it was more of a case of “Does City have Heavy Pollution? Yes, City becomes polluted everywhere quickly”.

What we found most disappointing is there is not much of the low-level micro-management that was promised. What sets the Cities XL/XXL series apart from the SimCity series is the latter focuses much more on micro management and is more organic. In SimCity you say where you want residential, commercial and industrial areas, then depending on the desirability of the area would dictate what would be built there. This would not be static, you could have a luxury hi-rise apartment, but if crime in the area goes up this may become abandoned becoming an eyesore on your landscape. Cities XL/XXL cities generally remain the same, you will not find one neighborhood going from being desirable for Elites to suddenly becoming deserted.

Despite this short coming, one major addition that will help over time to make the Cities XXL the city building game we have been waiting for is the inclusion of the Steam Workshop. I really look forward to seeing the modding community making new buildings, new functions, improvements, fixes and potentially new functionality.

If you are a fan of the series, the current 50% discount off the price is very reasonable. Even not as a full game but £15 as a kind of expansion is not bad value. If you’ve never owned a game in this series and you want large sprawling cities rather than the small towns in SimCity then this is a game well worth picking up.

After seeing this on Gamespot's Random Encounter, I was hooked! So purchased the original Japanese version with the English language pack along with the Holiday Star sequel/expansion.

Since purchasing this game on Steam I can honestly recommend it as a deep, compelling tale of a group of birds, and a human, who attent a school named St Pidgeonations. You follow several storylines with various options to improve your stats and become close to one of your feathery companions.

On the outside this game may just seem like a joke, it originally was! However don't be fooled! This game will pull you in by the wing and you will not be dissapointed.

Hopefully Holiday Star will come out on Steam too.

Just be careful when explaining this game in public to those who have never heard of it... You will get some strange looks.

This game is really good. For me it feels like GTA meets Deus Ex. The graphics look nice, the audio is good, the controls are clever. The game mechanics feel very fresh.

I am only around 3 or 4 hours in so this is a very short review but so far this game seems really engaging. The story is quite engrossing so far with plenty of side missions and some sandboxing too. You are able to freely roam the entire city straight away but have to do set missions to be able to unlock extra hacking in certain parts of the city.

The driving is quite good and driving in 1st person is a nice touch. Your car does seem to be able to take quite a lot of damage without much being visible though and lamposts are as weak as they are in GTA.

The in-car radio has a nice selection of tracks, hopefully there will be a way of adding your own music. You can also listen to music via your in-game phone too which is fantastic. Your in game phone works quite well, similar to that in GTA but in many ways, more useful.

Using your phone you can also request a car from a list you have unlocked, this seems a bit pointless as you can just steal any car you like on the spot.

The voice acting is also good, though to begin with it is hard to really feel any empathy towards Aiden but after the first act you start to like him and his sister as characters and care more about him. The other story characters are also quite memorable especially your ally, Jordi.

The game feels very relevent with the recent NSA scandel in the states, plus DeadSec feel very much like Anonymous, you do have a guy who tips you off who even comes across as a member of Anonymous too bar the Vendetta mask.

Anyone who likes GTA, Stealth games and Computers/Hacking etc will really like this game.

Running this on:
i5 2500k @ 4.4Ghz
16GB DDR3
AMD 7950 3GB GPU
Asus D2X Xonar Soundcard
Windows 8.1

I have all settings turned up to Ultra, V-Sync on and Refresh rate at 120. AA is on SSAO. Very playable FPS.