Recent reviews by Zlorfik [CH/BY]

Cheese

I wasn't aware that Helldivers was an Arrowhead title until the Helldivers 2 controversy. But I'm glad so I can right an old wrong and leave the review this game deserves.

Sadly, I came very late to the party and most of the galactic war had already transpired several times. However, I immediately fell in love with the visuals, the propaganda and the quite steep difficulty curve. What else to say? For super earth!

I wasn't actually aware this is an Arrowhead title until the Helldivers 2 controversy. But I'm glad I realised because this means I can bring my long due review for the Gauntlet.

The gauntlet mainly interested me, because it is a game to play couch coop. As someone whose wife is also into gaming, it is much more agreeable to snuggle in front of the TV than sit at one's own PC.

The Gauntlet is an amazing game with great couch coop features, that make for a fun yet challenging experience. It doesn't offer too much replay value unfortunately, but the core gameplay is solid, fun and visually appealing.

Update 06.05.24: Thanks to Arrowhead's tireless efforts, Sony dropped the requirement for the end of the month for the moment. As a result, the ministry of truth has reinstated the original review.

Update 04.05.24: Sony's greedy, corporate claws have taken hold of Super Earth. As a result, this review is no longer a recommendation of the game

This original review has been verified by the ministry of truth:
As a returning player of the original Helldivers game, Helldivers 2 is a very strong continuation of the good aspects that HD1 provided. The witty humour, over the top execution of almost everything, references to great old movies, etc... It just feels very well done. However, what really went above and beyond is the change from an isometric view to a 3rd/1st person shooter. The amount of epicness just multiplied by more than one dimension. Sure it felt great escaping with your Helldiver in isometric view. But there it felt more like you controlling a battlefield whereas in HD2 you control the Helldiver.

The amount of chaos, funny teamkills, epic extractions, mind baffling boss mob kills... It just works so well. If you like shooters & coop, theres almost no chance you'll not like HD2.

As an avid fan of Spellforce 2 & 3 as well as turn based combat, 4X and the type of game mixture Spellforce: Conquest of Eo is, i can say with confidence that this game has been a great installment into the Spellforce universe. Its nice looking, well done and Necromancy rules. What more do you want?

Oh boy, where do I even start? Ever since I forced my wife to play Divinity: Original Sin, she and I were on the lookout for games that play well in split screen, have an interesting story to follow and somewhat complex combat alongside of appealing graphics. Truth be told, there are very few such games. After doing about 3 playthroughs of D:OS and 8 playthroughs of D:OS 2, my wife was finally "burnt out" from it. She kept searching for alternatives. Eventually she found BG3. And man was she excited. I shared her excitement, but it was still years until release.

She got the EA version and played a good few 100 hours. I myself kept myself in the Dark for a better, consistent story experience on launch. And when that day came... What is sunlight? What are friends? BG3 captured me like no game before. While I had some previous experience with DnD based video games, this was the first one I really liked. I think this is mostly based on the 5e ruleset. In any case, I love the depth of the customisation options from a race * class perspective. I liked character creation, though this was less of a focus of mine. But what I really loved was the consequences of choices you make. While in some cases there is illusion of choice, seeing that your actions have consequences that can vary wildly and affect the storyline in a huge way is very refreshing to see, especially considering recent open world games labelling themselves as RPG.

Stability wise the game is not all that great, even after many patches and fixes. I believe this is specifically a split-screen issue, since many people report not having any problems. In any case, we had multiple crashes, several camera glitches, blackscreen/whitescreen in conversations, missing voiceover in dialogue, controller recognition... To some degree I am lenient on that judgement, since Larian justifiably moved the launch forward. But some issues are part of the UI/UX and that remind me of similar issues in D:OS 2. I hope Larian will address these in the future.

Still, all in all this game is the best I've ever played I think. An outstanding 9/10

Where do I even start? I was skeptical when Starfield was announced. I was loosly following the news about the game's development. I was watching marketing from Bethesda. Until the 1h marketing video, I was not interested. That one changed it to me at least giving it a try. So here we are.

Is Starfield a bad game? No. Will you get your money's worth out of it? Yes. Is Starfield something special? Definitely not. Let me explain.

For every single aspect in Starfield, be this ship building, exploration, RPG elements, story, quests, etc. you can find a game that does it way way better. Many games have most of those elements in one game as well and do them better. It feels like Bethesda wrote down a list of features they want to have and did their own version of it. That's not wrong, but their own version was not innovative. As a result, their version is not always interesting. Starfield is a jack-of-all-trades of functionality, but a master-of-none.

What pissed me off the most was honestly bad systems that were more or less just copied from their earlier games without a single thought on whether this is the right approach. Take foods. I am omparing to Skyrim, because I have very little knowledge with their other titles. Food in Skyrim was irrelevant. It was nothing more than a meme. Plus vegetable soup. Why would you bother putting a functionality in the game, if it is ultimately pointless? Starfield's food is the same, except it feels even worse. Oh, a meat chunk for 4 health when I have 400? No. Bethesda. This is crap. Not only is the bonus you get from eating inconsequential, but You don't go ahead and stuff your face with 500 meat chunks IN THE MIDDLE OF BATTLE. No. This system was crap, is crap and will be crap in TES6 because I can guarantee you that Bethesda will not change things.

Food is but one thing. The world - especially NPCs - are unreactive to the player's presence or actions, the dialogue (or should I say monologue) is linear and quests feel generic. Why is it, that with every game Bethesda releases, good functionality is lost? Cast a spell on yourself in Skyrim and guards react. Shoot the floor next to a Starfield guard and they just give you the weirdest side-eyes. If you ask folks from earlier games they consider Skyrim already a let-down in functionality. Is TES6 going to be a slide show?

So in conclusion, while the game is not bad per se, it is utterly uninspired, it is not worthy of that big marketing effort, it is not the next great thing, It is not something special. It is for sure not the game of the year.
If you are okay with Skyrim and Fallout levels of mediocricy, go ahead, you'll like Starfield. I'd have expected a better product after 12 years since Skyrim and according to their trailer on Steam 25 years in the making with all the success they had with Skyrim and the money they must have made from it. Bethesda was either too lazy or too scared to change anything about what was part of their most successful game, but failed to realize what actually made it successful.

I should preface this by saying that I loved Amplitude and their Endless games and was excited to see what Amplitude can do with "the Golden standard that is the Civilization formula". I put it in quotes because i dont believe in that.

Starting off, i was part of the open dev scenarios and was able to see where their development was headed. Humankind had some promising ideas to shake up the stagnation in development of Civ-like games. The approach of evolving cultures as well as a grading system that didn't mean the game would only be decided in the end was appealing.

In the open dev scenarios i was happy with the fighting system. It proved that environmental factors and strategical play were often more important than the unit strengths. There were also some downsides in terms of explanation of things. They did address most of it though with the release. Sadly, they also dumbed down the combat by a fair bit, maybe because the feedback was that it was too hard. Idk but it is a strategy game, not sims.

In the early access i also saw one of the problems that sadly is still present to this day and that is shared by most of these games: when you have clearly already won but still need to click through 100 turns. I guess they were hoping that the star rating system would circumvent that, but either the balance for that is way off or the fact that snowballing still unbalances all these efforts anyway is just stronger.

My worst problem though is with the AI. In many games, AI is an issue in that it is not competirive enough. That's a problem of the industry and not something i hold them accountable for. What i do though is that higher difficulty levels really ruin the game. The biggest unique feature about humankind is civilization progression. However, in harder difficulties it is straight up impossible to get any say in what culture you end up with, because the AI is boosted to such extreme levels that for 3-4 eras you are just going to be behind with nothing you can do about it. So for 3-4 eras you dont get to pick your culture. This is really backwards because it removes the only big uniqueness that Humankind has to offer.

While the game is visually appealing, ultimately i can not support this game. I think Amplitude's skill and knowledge serves a fantasy universe better, because then you're not restricted by historical accuracy.

Let's start this off with a disclaimer. I am a long standing fan of Cyan's puzzle adventure games, have played all of their games multiple times and enjoyed countless hours with their worlds. I was a backer on the Kickstarter campaign for Firmament and I am playing on PC without VR.

With that out of the way, let's get started. I want to go over different categories of what I think makes puzzle adventures and Cyan games in particular enjoyable. I am going to rate stars out of 5.

The setting is what you'd expect from a Cyan game and it is how they advertised the game: It's a steampunk puzzle adventure with several worlds - here called realms - with different biomes. There's lots of pipes, there's steam, there's mechanical stuff and there's futuristic technology mixed in. I expected nothing less. But I was also not blown off my chair of excitement.

The team at Cyan know how to make worlds look beautiful. It may not be the best visuals you can find in the game industry as of today, but i think this matters little when the realms look as breathtaking as they do. I expected great visuals and they delivered a great new high for Cyan games. The worlds look nice, have a logical consistency to them and seem very natural and realistic.

Firmament introduces a sort of multitool attached to your right arm called an adjunct. With it you plug into sockets and depending on the socket, you have a variety of options on what it affects. This is clearly a product of the VR first approach. Now, I can not speak for VR, since I played on a flatscreen, but to me this made it glaringly obvious that I was missing something I was not even expecting to be important: Pushing buttons, pulling levers, turning dials, booping a beetle, rattling on a locked door's handle... The adjunct allowed you to do two things: left or right. Nothing else. And it really took away from the experience. I never thought I'd miss pushing a button. But it seems it is important. On a sidenote, sockets always stand out from their environment, so it is always glaringly obvious where you need to click. Now earlier Cyan games sometimes had a bit of the opposite where you click wildly on your screen to see what interacts. Neither are good. But looking for the interactible objects has always been part of exploring the world in Cyan games and one that I think is very important.

While the concepts of the worlds were decent and what you'd about expect from a Cyan game, several aspects of them are very glaringly same-y with some of their Myst games. You'll always be travelling to different worlds, you'll always have worlds with specific themes (e.g. electricity, nature, water, etc). And in the instance of Firmament they basically took one idea from one of their earlier games and pretty much copy pasted it to Firmament. Sure, there's a twist on it unique to Firmament and the scale of it is very different. At the same time i had nothing but a "but you did this one before" reaction at the reveal. Not terrible, but also not great. Cyan games have always convinced with their unique new worlds, their unique new concepts. I am missing this a little in Firmament.
Not to lose myself too much here, but the game Quern showed us players, how a puzzle adventure can be done differently. You don't need different worlds. You don't need different biomes. hat matters is that the world building is consistent and that there is a novelty to the concept.

There is quite a bit of "just running" involved to solve certain puzzles. Now I don't mind exploring, but having to run back and forth the same path 5 times - either because you screwed something up or because it's part of the puzzle seems a bit too much. You run quickly in Firmament, but for me personally it was a bit much.

Cyan games have always been praised by how well they seemlessly incorporate puzzles into the world design. Well, not in Firmament. I can't name a single puzzle that doesn't feel deliberately placed. If you ask yourself the simple question: As a person living in that realm, would you build that level this way? The answer is in all cases: no. I was very disappointed by this since I am not used to that by Cyan.

Puzzles in Firmament felt very different from other Cyan games. The game doesn't use clues you discover by exploring. You see a puzzle and you immediately know what to do and how to approach the solution. The remaining part is then moving things around to get to the solution, which can take a lot of time, depending on the puzzle. There was only one puzzle where I had to stop moving and reflect on how to approach the solution. That's the only puzzle I thoroughly enjoyed. I am not expecting there to be only puzzles like that - previous installments had more trivial puzzles too - but to me it took away from the experience. The game is certainly more accessible this way to people who simply want to walk through the game without too much "figuring out" on the way.

Given how many puzzles didn't take a lot of time to figure out how to solve it, but rather just achieving it, there is a severe amount of tedium to some puzzles. I spent 3h on one puzzle where I knew how to do it a minute after entering the area, but was fighting against the controls and level design on how to achieve what I had to do. To me this is not a puzzle. This is tedium. This may be a very personal thing, but I did not enjoy that.

I neither liked or disliked the story. It failed to enthrall me like earlier Cyan games did, but it wasn't badly written. The ending was definitely not that well executed since the revelation of what's actually going on is thrown at you in the closing moments without giving you time to develop a feeling about it.

To be honest my score here is probably a bit harsh, but playing after 5 patches have already been delivered I would have expected less game breaking bugs. I had a short panic when I realized I had become stuck trying to solve a puzzle, because I didn't realize I was outside the game boundary for so long, that my autosave was long overwritten. My previous save was 3.5h earlier and had solved that tedious puzzle mentioned earlier. Luckily, the game comes with a reset button. It not only resets the player, but also moves any interactibles back to a position you can use it again from. So why such a low rating? Well, I had to reset 5 times to solve one aspect of one puzzle, which meant that I spent even more time "just running" back to where I needed to be. In total, I had to reset the game about 8 times in 19h of playtime. Now, I have played games with more bugs in less time, but the amount and type of bugs coupled with the single autosave and only 2 save slots meant that you are eventually going to run into a reset situation. I usually don't mind bugs all that much - i understand it, it's a natural part of development - but in Firmament they were actually really upsetting me. Thus the score.


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Having never played Darkest Dungeon 1, DD2 is a masterpiece in its own right. The graphical style is superb, the voice acting on point and the mechanics brutal, but fair and interesting. If you like turn based tactical combat with a tactical element between battles and don't mind the roguelike setting, this is your game.