Nedávné recenze uživatele DiggerDog

No instructions, so for the first five puzzles or so, it's difficult to figure out what's going on. After that, it's just unusual puzzle solving. Paper and pencil might be easier, if you could colour code the connecting lines, but it's a game that is highly suited to the computer because there are lots of switches that make and break connections. Moreover, as segments of the puzzle are completed, they are removed from the screen. The only penalties one gets is having to start the puzzle over after 2 or 3 false moves on a level; otherwise, there is no optimisation. Take note, there is a night mode. Click on the menu on the top right to find it.

I like the game mostly because I got it to work well with my very, very old racing wheel. I’d say the game’s best quality is: it just works. After it’s set up properly.

I would have returned the game for a refund if the wheel or pedals did not work.

My Logitech Momo wheel (May 2007) has been in a closet for over a decade (was there a super sale in 2007?) and this is easily the most (only?) fun I’ve had with it. I don’t recall the exact hold-up back in 2007, except that I got all worried while running a madly vibrating force feedback wheel on a desk with several spinning hard-drives. I meant to get my computer onto a cabinet beside my desk, but never did.

I have to do all the following to get my wheel and Horizon 5 to work:

Spend about 10 minutes physically clearing stuff away and setting up the wheel
Clean boot into my Microsoft account associated with my XBox account that is now associated with my Steam account
Start my Logitech profiler software (set to a persistent profile)
Plug in a PC (XBox-style) game controller (controller might be needed for the game to boot at all)
Start XBox (MS XBox for PC) automatically signs me into my XBox account (or the game will not boot)
Start Steam
Start Forza Horizon 5
Set aside 10 minutes to remove the wheel and restore my desk

Apparently, the original release of Horizon 5 was slightly different from the MS Game Store than on Steam’s store, and the MOMO wheel is still listed online as being incompatible with the Steam version of the game. It’s worked fine for me. If you want more assurance of continuing compatibility, buy directly from MS? (I am not that worried because I recently learned there now exist 3rd party utilities to allow most common racing wheels to mimic game controllers…but I’m hoping I never need to find and figure them out.)

I haven’t re-checked earlier versions, but in Forza 5 there are many sliders to fine-tune the driving settings; I suspect I could get the wheel to exactly mimic the wheel shown for the internal driver’s view, but I never got around to fine tuning the adjustments that closely, because I rarely use the driver’s view.

I just like driving down the roads in Forza. Using the wheel, I can drive quite fast without going off the roadway, although the game is kind of boring if I drive so slowly that I’m able to confidently stay in my lane. I can slow a bit, drive one-handed, and take a sip from a drink. Can’t do that with a controller. If I set the difficulty to the lowest setting, I can win every race too (unless I wipe out on in the last quarter mile…and there’s always the rewind function if one really needs to win all the time.) Mostly I just like to drive around.
Horizon 5 is better than Horizon 4 in that there’s no recurrent winter season that one has to deal with. As well, Horizon 5’s graphics are probably better than version 3 or 4…but not there’s not enough improvement to stand out against my year-old memories of the earlier games.

I’m still nowhere near as good with a wheel as I was with a joystick playing back in 1998-99 with games like Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit and Need For Speed: High Stakes. But I think that eventually I’ll get there.
Last year, I got pissed off while trying to play Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. Driving the Wildlands vehicles or controlling the drones with the WASD keys was very frustrating so I decided to learn how to use a controller by practicing Forza Horizon 3 and 4. I put in about 40 hours and never learned to use the controller very well. I could sort of get there…win some races. But the controller never felt relaxed and natural. This year, when I tried the controller again, I was always very tense. I don’t think I’ll ever put in the hours to become comfortable with controllers.

New racing wheels are over-priced right now. And any wheel’s setup, at least temporarily, takes over a desk. This driving game is fun, but it’s a pain to set up.

Highly recommended game, because if you do like it, you might like it a lot. The game won’t please all Left 4 Dead 2 players – there’s LOTS of 3D-map-reading, jumping, and peering over cliffs; or maybe you’ll just hate the colour schemes or working in parallel with teammates, rather than side by side, staring at the same targets - but you should know in well under two hours if you don’t like the game (so there’s time for a Steam refund).

The best place to see what the gameplay is like is in one of YouTube’s many video reviews. I like these two best: “Deep Rock Galactic Is Seriously Great” and “The Support Tools of Deep Rock Galactic”. I’ve also grown oddly fond of pretending to do something useful in a video game, instead of just dodging and killing as fast as possible. (I also like the spirit of the music videos “Diggy Diggy Hole” and “No Dwarf Left Behind (Remastered)”, but suspect they resonate much better for veteran players.)

So why have I quit playing?

I’m not sure. I think because the multiplayer socialization is so limited and flawed. And once you’ve started to approach your own skill limits in a game, it’s the other people that keep the game interesting.

The game is a weird hybrid between multiplayer co-op and single player. Most of the time, it feels like one is playing solo in parallel with other people playing their own solo games and who only see each other’s work about 20% of the time. There are NO natural lulls in the gameplay for multiplayer chat – during the relatively easy fights I need to concentrate just enough to make talking difficult, and between fights, I’m usually trying to explore or harvest resources as fast as possible, and that too takes most of my attention and is best done without giving much attention to others.

Despite this lack of working directly together, there is a remarkably good feeling in the random player groups. I’ve played over 600 missions with random groups of people and I’ve only encountered ONE definite griefer (a guy so mixed up that he genuinely didn’t seem to understand that the teammate he fired upon would not find it funny to be team-killed a few seconds before escaping on the recovery rocket). The game somehow creates a really good team spirit.

I think what bugs me most about the multiplayer is that when I started my microphone worked, but somewhere along the line, it just stopped working. It works in every other game and utility I’ve tried. The game has been released for a LONG time. This problem should not exist.

Also, for me and many other people on the forums, Steam Friends related functions basically do not work. I never see any DRG games in “Recently Played With”. Steam’s “View…Players” function usually has a delay before showing anyone, and never shows me the host player of a game.

Most missions only last about 15 minutes, so there’s not much time to get to know your fellow players, particularly if they join a mission in already in progress and nearly finished (same experience for late-joiners). Usually, everyone leaves the group at the end of every mission. This is encouraged by (1) the boredom in waiting while other people pause for several minutes and tinker with their character’s gradually improving load-outs, or (2) the desire to choose one’s next mission, or (3) the desire to get experience as fast as possible by joining other missions already in progress, or (4) each players’ need to do player-specific assignments (about 30% or more of missions one plays are part of strings of multi-mission assignments, which differ from individual to individual).

Finally, I don’t like the limitations on the 3D-map display.

These problems are not going away. The development team is working on adding more maps, mission types, and foes, rather than fixing these basics. The server browser lets you click on the host’s name and see their Steam profile – neat! But it doesn’t show ping, or variability in ping, or tell you how often the host’s games run to completion (there seem to be many people hosting with poor internet or barely adequate computers…or who simply don’t bother to apologize when they abruptly close the game to deal with real world issues). And the browser gives you an awkward and seemingly unnecessary space station reload whenever your connection to a host game does not work.

So why don’t I continue in solo?

I played over 300 games solo, and had a blast. At the end of each mission you usually must travel to the rescue vehicle – that was the whole mission for me. Getting the job done was almost always methodical and satisfying, but getting back to the rescue vehicle was a challenge (mostly because I didn’t know all the game mechanics I later learned, and because I played a solo engineer instead of a driller or scout) and I had some of the most tense few minutes I’ve enjoyed since avoiding anti-submarine defenses in Silent Service II (1990) and Red Storm Rising (1988, but I played it in ’90). It was great. But I navigate better now, I prepare my evacuation route very carefully, and I FINALLY realized that I can relocate before calling the rescue vehicle (took me 200+ solo games to realize that?) And it’s not as much fun running into problems if you knew damn well how to avoid them. So solo DRG has lost most of its appeal for me.

The game is still on my computer for now. It was fun. It was great. But early on, I’d really hoped it would be a L4D2 replacement. It’s not.

It's OK. I wouldn't buy it, but if you've already bought it, it might be worth a play through. Takes about 2 hours. Very different from any game I've played before. There are some very pretty scenes. The fifth (of six) flower's dream is dark and unpleasant, but the final flower's dream is nice. Flower dreams last about 20 minutes. There's no save within a dream, each dream is repeatable and when completed, opens up the next flower and its dream. The keys to be aware of are WASD, spacebar (keep the spacebar pressed when you want to affect anything), as well as the mouse and occasionally left/right clicks? Trying for fine control can be frustrating. In the game discussions, I saw one person call Flower a baffling grind. Well, no. But it's definitely not for everyone. I think I know a few people that would like the game (but as far as I know, those people don't play computer games normally), but I wouldn't recommend it to most gamers. Unless you're looking for something that's very different.

Update: Oct. 16th.
Hmmm. Recommended, and potentially beautiful graphics, but (that was a short infatuation)

- I won't play this game to death. Once was definitely enough. I wish I'd stopped after the main game. I wish I hadn't bought the DLC.
- Don't start your Tomb Raider experience in this game; except for the graphics, TR 2013 and SotTR are better. I think I liked TR 2013 enough to make a final play-through on the hardest difficulty, using only the bow, and skipping all the tombs and artifacts (which give you experience towards skills).
- The maps are harder to use than ever. That was never a problem for the following the main quest, but while cleaning up the secondary quests, I often lost the "go here" "next goal" markers. Worse, The best way for me to discover that I'd finished all the tombs, was to check my Steam achievements, rather than clicking easily through the world map. (BTW, click and drag with the mouse is the "obvious" way to move the map that I never figured out.)
- The DLC tombs are OK. In fact, all the DLC is just OK. The main game's tombs are usually found at the end of long, difficult trails, and navigating your way back to the main game can be a challenge. I liked that. The DLC tombs usually are one-way journeys and you teleport back to the main game after reaching your goal. I don't like that. In general, I liked the journeys to the tombs, but SotTR's tombs were so over the top, especially in the DLC, that it broke immersion for me. Almost every monument was the equivalent of a ten story building and plaza, secretly built and cleverly hidden for a thousand years, and and still working perfectly to test would-be adventurers. Who does maintenance and resets those traps?
- There's too much special ammunition. For example, most enemies in the second half of the game, need to be stealth killed from short range, or shot twice in the head - once to take off their helmet, once to kill them. That's good. ...or Lara can just shoot one fear arrow into an enemy and they will turn paranoid and kill one or two friends before dying from the hallucinogen. That's over-powered. I never even tried some of the special ammo like concussion grenades.
- Lara talks to everyone in English. Almost everyone replies in Spanish. That breaks immersion (and means you cannot look away from the screen). There's an option for everyone to talk in English, but we're warned that it might break immersion. Really?
- And nope, I could NOT wear any owned outfit everywhere while cleaning up unfinished quests. There's an option to let me do that. But (even if I'd found it in time) it warns that it only works after the main story is finished. Sigh.
- And finally, nope, Lara never smiles, except when she is talking to a friend. Doesn't she enjoy jumping around on cliff faces?

Cleaning up was definitely much worse than the main game.

I may be a bit soured from a couple of frustrations: I spent over an hour trying to get a recording of some beautiful scenes in the game, and finding out that NVidia's Shadow Player recording program simply doesn't interface well with TR (or maybe with TR in HDR mode?) I can't get a recording that looks anything but washed out.

More aggravation: I wrote a much more extensive update, but that got lost because to save&close a review update, you click "Edit Review" again. If you simply hit "Close", your update is lost.

Oct 2nd:
Holy s**t. Just finished a few minutes ago. Very glad to be finished. Satisfied. Not sure when (or if) I will ever go back and complete the game, or play it on a level of difficulty above normal. But I'm pretty happy just now.

I really enjoyed the previous two Tomb Raider games, TR 2013 and RotTR. This game is both better and worse than those two games. After pre-ordering and spending more money on SotTR than any previous game, I fell out of it early on and decided to wait until I had a better computer. Yep. A longer wait than anticipated. (Thanks, Covid.) But now, with ultimate levels of ray-tracing and HDR on a great screen, this game seems pretty damned beautiful. And that helps. A lot. Maybe more for me this past week, because I just laid out a fair bit of money on a new computer and screen; I may be overestimating the satisfaction from this game as proof to myself of the value of my hardware purchase. But I liked it. A lot. If game graphics never get any better than this, well shoot, I'm happy with this. (And of course, computers WILL keep getting better.)

I was a bit surprised though: a lot of the appeal of the game is watching beautiful Lara Croft, and in this TR game, while Lara is beautiful, she is not supermodel beautiful, she is almost always frowning, and the player cannot choose her attire freely for over half the game, because Lara wears disguises. What?

That is the worst part of the game.

I suppose it helps with the story. Maybe one feels more closely bonded with a more believable beauty? In the snow in RotTR, I had to choose to give Lara a warm parka, or a clingy Henley. No choice here: keep wearing the disguise.

The puzzles are the best I've seen in TR.

The environments are ridiculous, but also the best I've seen in TR. Lara's spidey-sense no longer identifies walls that she can drive a spike into, and that helps...mostly.

The water...gorgeous water. Play tip: invest in the hold-your-breath longer skills before you need them.

Lara can do more actions, like rappelling up and down a rope from a rock overhang. That's great. She can even play at Spiderman, and can almost crawl across ceilings. That's unnecessary.

There are fewer quick time events (mash A and D, now press F, etc.) and I like that.

The gauntlets, the mad dashes through environments that are falling to pieces all around Lara seem less frequent. I like that too.

The story is as dumb as ever. But not usually annoying. At one point though: Lara finds herself without firearms and must fight and kill (and loot) a couple of dozen evil minions...but never picks up any of their guns. Well...OK.

Yeah...at the least, I'll probably find and finish all the tombs in the game. Good puzzles. And since the tombs aren't in the main story line, maybe Lara can wear that blue Henley?

"Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage!"
Nope. It's gather and craft mostly. And what little early fighting there is even easier than gathering berries. Maybe EVENTUALLY you get some interesting fighting. I watched a YouTube video of the first boss fight, available after several hours of preparation. Basically, kiting around with a bow and arrow and killing a monster stag with dangerous antlers. I should have looked a little deeper before trying Valheim out. I'm sure the game is quite rewarding if you like to make a huge commitment of time to each weapon and piece of armor that you get, and it looks like there are vast opportunities to figure out better and better ways to improve your tech and get strong. Bigger sense of achievement. But it's not for me.

Sniper Elite 4 Review: (Feb. 23)

I come away from completing a mission in this game feeling good.

Recommended, but best wait for one of the regular, deep sales.

Good: pretty environment, lots of room to set custom difficulty. For example, you can turn off the wind and gravity effects on bullets separately. You can adjust enemy aggressiveness and toughness and player toughness separately. You can even add an aim-assist diamond, although this makes the game ridiculously easy. You can vary your combat style according to your mood: close-in with silenced pistols and melee kills, or long-range sniping, or loud sub-machine gun battles. Unlike many modern WW2 shooters, there are no vehicles to drive, and no endless streams of enemies that keep appearing until you advance to the next check point. You can save anywhere. This game reminds me of the original Call of Duty game. You can kill all the enemies on any map, they stay dead and their bodies stay available for careful looting when you have time. The two-person co-op works well too, and although the game is much easier in co-op, one tends to advance faster and live more dangerously with a partner, so the second player doesn’t make things ridiculously easy.

Bad: stupid x-ray kill-cams which help a lot in showing you where your shot hit, but are gratuitously macabre; 100% silent and deadly melee attacks; bushes and flower beds that act like impenetrable fog to enemies, even in bright daylight; binoculars that act like laser range-finders; cheerily-lighted night maps which ignore black-out restrictions; unlimited pebbles that distract bad guys when they land, but are never traced back to the thrower; odd controls: default is press-c to crouch, hold-c to go prone…if there is enough room to go prone; two separate triggers: one for your gun, and another (the f key) for whatever equipment (or stone, or bandages, or grenade, or whistle) you have equipped; third person instead of first person; and of-course, a far-fetched story (killing bad guys is never enough – it has to be stopping super-weapons too) with characters you don’t care much about (but whose 40+ minutes of cut-scenes spread across 10 missions, can be ignored and never triggered, or if triggered, can be skipped with the space key.)

Recommend: check out Brutal Barracuda’s 100+ tips for Sniper Elite 4 on YouTube.

Update April 18: the odd controls are STILL annoying after 300 hours of play. On the PC, they would have been very easy to fix; perhaps they make more sense on consoles that have to combine several functions on one key? I thought I'd get used to strange crouch control; I didn't, and I still get mad when I NEED at minimum to crouch but I try to hit the deck in a confined area with no room to go prone and I simply remain standing.

Also, it's still annoying that the same button is used to throw a rock, heal myself, or lay a mine. Additionally, custom difficulties are not properly implemented on co-op games. Why not? Perhaps limitations on custom difficulty makes sense in PvP, but not in co-op.

Finally, although the missions are very much open world, they end up being not much more repeatable than the missions in a very linear game, because the same enemies always start out in the same places; I've seen YouTube videos of players, sneaking through maps on the highest difficulty settings, who've obviously memorized particular patrol routes and times of particular enemies.

I've spent most of my game time playing Survival, and I've enjoyed it a lot, but it's time to get back to more populated multiplayer games. :tta_smile_very_happy:

It's OK. It's very, different, has no obvious flaws, and it's not horrible. That's impressive. Making something very different that is nevertheless OK or better is very impressive. But was it entertaining for me? It was OK. I can see that some people would love it. Not too many FPS players, but a few. For most of the action game crowd it'll be...OK. Am I glad I played it? Well, happily it's not another game that I bought and never played. I read it would only take 2 hours. I decided to play it and finish it in one sitting. Got it done in a bit over that without consulting any walk-throughs or FAQs. I'm happy that I followed my plan. I'm satisfied that I'm no longer wondering if I was missing out on a game that garnered such rave reviews. But I sort of wish I'd never heard of the thing. Because for me, it's only OK.

Update: I don't really like the high-level game play; it's aimed at people who are playing all the time (as I was when I originally wrote the review that follows).

Superb graphics, clever, mostly great and funny scripts read by superb voice actors, and a much improved co-op system. The first run through the game felt quite good. How much you enjoy it, will depend on who you play with. I think it's OK to play alone. So far, except for post-victory loot farming, I've played mostly with my brother who lives 1800 miles away, so I enjoyed the company and the game. I would wait for a 50% off sale, and if you think you will play the game a lot, get the super deluxe edition. But...

Despite all that, these are what I consider to be undesirables in the game:
- a constantly changing game; if you set aside the game for three months, your carefully optimized skills and chosen weapons will no longer be optimal for your level, not to mention that the level cap will have increased by 3 or 4 levels, regardless of whether or not you bought any DLC, so much of your gear will be headed for the junk heap.
- deliberate hobbling of the user interface in many, many ways. The theory seems to be, as in The Matrix, that players won't enjoy the game without sufficient annoyances. So the inventory system is deliberately annoying. The map system is deliberately annoying. The fast travel system is deliberately annoying. Figuring out how much damage your gun does is deliberately annoying. Figuring out how to keep track of way-points in parallel quests is deliberately annoying. Finding a few items in your 400 item bank is deliberately annoying. Certainly, there is some satisfaction in figuring out the best ways to work around these deliberate annoyances, but...I'd prefer something that challenged me more in figuring out how to progress or beat tough enemies than the best way to do administrative work with my characters.
- deliberate omission of easily conceived ideas, like being able to save skill setups and weapon load-outs
- an interesting, but less satisfying overall story than Borderlands 2, or even Borderlands 1.
- deliberately uglier character models...I miss the eye-candy quality of some of them
- long, unskippable scenes where the characters are animated, and you might even be actively following another character or walking along a path, but which could have been replaced by skippable cut-scenes; this meant that the fourth time that I ran through the story, I turned off the sound and listened to a podcast while I opened up all the fast-travel stations in TVHM on my second character
- unbalanced high-level characters who are much, much better than their low level counterparts whose games they join...yes, the situation of high level characters joining low level characters isn't utterly unworkable as it was in previous Borderlands games, but still, it would not have been hard to give game hosts the option to much more severely nerf optimized high-level characters who join their games; players could even be given handicaps when joining games, according to how successful they'd been in the recent past
- no heroic character to play: the most heroic character you can play, pretty well any character you choose, is no more good than Clint Eastwood's character in the Good the Bad and the Ugly...and you'd be well advised to not buy a used car from Clint's so-called "good" character in that movie.

Odd things I learned about myself
I like to hear great swathes of evil gnomes screaming.

And for the good
A few interesting social questions are raised. But one can't explore them very well in a video game with a linear plot, and as I said, the overall plot is kind of underwhelming, despite the wonderful writing in many scenes, and excellently done shouts and interjections during battles.

Really loved the clots. Scary.

But...didn't really fit with the story of KF as described in game. This relates the story of sort of a 28 Days Later accident, rather than a calculated evil brought about by the scientist who became The Patriarch and others, as described in the in-game notes. On the other hand, it really made me wish we'd seen more of the outbreak in 28 Days Later.

Really well done, considering the budget. Not a lot of costumes, actors, or fancy sets, but it didn't feel utterly contrived, like some of the deliberately silly scenes in Sharknado.