Recent reviews by Thirdrail

Fantastic game, terrible optimization. And I mean terrible. I manage to bypass a lot of optimization issues in games, since I use a 2k card (3070) to play in 1080, and Wilds still struggles. Constantly. If you haven't already jumped into this game, and you don't NEED to play new MH games as soon as possible, my advice is to wait a couple of months. Capcom will fix some or all of the issues. Grab it the first time it goes on sale. By then it should be fully cooked, not half-baked like it is now.

Update: A month later, the game has gotten more crashy, not less. I've given up on even playing it for the time being.

It's natural to compare Marvel Rivals to Overwatch. They clearly share a lot of DNA. In both directions. Comic book super heroes inspired Overwatch, and now Overwatch has inspired a game about comic book super heroes. But there's more to Rivals than that, and the difference is in the nuance.

Overwatch was never this relaxed. Never. Not at launch, not in the beta. Blizzard's stick is so far up their butt, they couldn't make a game like Rivals if you gave them the assignment and a thousand years. Everyone in Rivals feels a little bit too powerful. It's the exact opposite of Overwatch, where the nerf bat rules all things, and no character is ever allowed to shine (RIP Brigitte). I keep wanting to say "it's Overwatch in the wild west days", but the truth is, Overwatch never had a wild west period. There were like two months with no role lock, but the characters were never allowed to blow up and swing games the way the heroes and their ults do in Rivals. Jeff the land shark could go through an Overwatch team alone, like Spiderman slapping down whole teams in Secret Wars.

Having said that, the game is not perfect. Most of the maps are uninspired. The battle pass has excellent stuff in it, and lasts forever (buy season 0 now, finish season 0's pass at your leisure, no matter how long it takes), but it's very slow. You only gain battle pass levels through missions. Just playing the game does nothing to advance your situation. That's a terrible design for a f2p game, and it makes an otherwise excellent battle pass feel both punishing and austere. The store is overpriced, but fun to shop in. The artwork is solid. Everyone looks fantastic. It is not, thank Yig, another aggressively asexual Disney production. It's real Marvel, sexypants and all. (If you're reading this after they've added Emma Frost to the game, take all the nice things I'm saying and multiply them by two.)

I'm a big fan, thus far. I was very sad when Blizzard ruined Overwatch. I'm thrilled to return to my old ways with a wilder Marvel themed hero shooter. I just hope they don't polish the fun out of this game, because the rough edges are what make it so different and interesting.

This game is insane. Street Fighter V was like Street Fighter II, +III. Like all previous Street Fighter games. They're all remarkably similar. Or, they were. Until this one.

Because VI is bananas. It's like the Street Fighter game you know wandered into a clunky open world rpg, and decided to set up camp and live in there, forever. I was sort of on the fence about it all, and then I met Blanka, and he gave me a Blanka mascot suit to wear. It is the funniest thing I've seen out of any game in so long. I wish I could have screenshots in this review, I'd show you. But google the Blanka suit. It's a true masterpiece.

Anyway, now I'm just like, ok, SFVI, I'll go with you on this crazy ride. In my Blanka suit. There's like a whole big multiplayer hub, too, where your character from the rpg can go play Street Fighter VI against other people's characters? Or something like that. I am not prepared for any of that, and probably online will be dead by the time I am, but who knows. In any case, this truly bizarre entry in an old and venerable franchise gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

I played the beta, and liked the game, but an online game doesn't just need to be a good game, it needs to be a festival worth attending on a regular basis, and THAT, Multiversus did not have, so I abandoned it.

Now it's back, and it's still a good Smash-y game, with a great roster of interesting fighters, AND there is actually a bunch of stuff to do. As of today, Multiversus is a fun online party, as online games should be.

It has some pricing that makes me scratch my head, like most free-to-play games, but a lot of the store is very reasonable. It's not as fun as shopping in Fortnite or League, but I think it might get there, if the game survives another year.

All in all, MultiVersus is a good time these days. I wondered if that founder's pack I bought in the beta would ever really pay off, and it did. Well done, Multiversus.

Having said all that, I am now going to uninstall here, because Steam is such a ♥♥♥♥ about in-game purchases, and reinstall at Epic, where if I can spend exactly what I'm trying to spend, instead of getting roped into Steam's predatory wallet shenanigans.

Like every Persona game, Metaphor ReFantazio is a fantastic turn based rpg, assuming you can give it your full and undivided attention for 80+ hours. If you have less to offer Metaphor than everything, skip it.

Far too expensive for a game with a dying player base. The prices scream "let's squeeze every last penny from whoever is still playing before we have to close everything down!"

This game is everything I always wanted out of both Skyrim and Baldur's Gate, in a gorgeous 3rd person action package. I never thought I'd play a game like Skyrim where the combat is actually cool and fun. I will say, it's probably a better game for people who like immerse themselves in a world than the quest-bangers who just want to plow through content for the achievements and go home. A lot of the splendor of this game is in the nuance, and it keeps the hand holding to absolute minimum, which means there are times where patience and experimentation are the only route forward.

I'll probably come back and expand this review later, but for the moment I just wanted to give this masterpiece of an action rpg the thumbs-up it deserves. This is the best thing Capcom has ever done.

The Good
- Starfield is unfathomably huge, and easily the best Bethesda game. It is neither as derivative as Skyrim, nor a shooter in disguise, like Fallout 4.
- The main story is surprisingly clever, and the blending of game mechanics and story is truly brilliant. New Game+ is not something the start menu is doing in Starfield, it's the central concept of the whole story. The idea is good, and the execution is excellent.
- The best missions are so good!

The Bad
- Space travel is just terrible. It's just a series of loading screens. Fast travel between worlds makes sense, but not being able to fly down and land on the planets is awful. It sucks to play a game about space exploration where the immersion is destroyed every time you get into a space ship. It also sucks that you never get to see anything from the air. I have no idea what New Atlantis looks like, as a whole city, despite the fact that I've flown into New Atlantis a hundred times. If you've ever been on airplane, you know that's not how flying works, at all.
- Terrible npcs. The full companions in this game are the worst. You have your choice of judgmental scolds.
- Huge sections of the game are unfinished. Whole big quest lines fizzle out into nothing. I've lost count of how many times I have run into some kind of dead end in the game that is obviously waiting for DLC to come along and complete it. Who knows how much Starfield will really cost, when it's actually finished, and you have to buy it in pieces.
- The merry-go-round of difficulty. Generally speaking, the early parts of a game, or even a quest line, should teach you skills and mechanics you need to clear the later, more difficult sections of the game, or quest line. There is NONE of that in Starfield. You'll get three 15 minute stealth missions that a toddler could complete with their eyes closed, and that will culminate in a final mission that's insanely difficult and takes several hours to complete.
- Needs hundreds, maybe thousands, of little bugs fixed.
- 1000 planets is a lie. There are not 1000 planets. There is one planet, repeated a thousand times, with slight variations. How slight? Well, they're all desert planets, with remarkably similar wildlife. There are no forests, or jungles, or swamps, or mountains. There is no water. Yes, you read that correctly. There is no "naturally occurring" water anywhere in Starfield. No oceans. No lakes. No rivers. Water only exists at the hand designed locations, i.e. in and around cities. (EDIT: This isn't quite true. After 150 hours of exploring, I DID stumble onto a procedurally generated planet that had coastlines! Still never seen a lake or river, though. And one instance of water in 150 hours is very close to zero.)
- The worst missions are so bad!

The Weird

- In attempt to be "inclusive", all the romance options in Starfield are omnivorous pansexuals, which is somehow both creepy and boring. It's supposed to be inclusive, but it feels a lot more like lazy writing, especially in the context of the game itself, which is, for the most part, very poorly written.
- I've never seen a game that offered you more chances to misbehave, or one that lectured you so endlessly any time you take the bait. And, of course, all the stuff the npcs are constantly mad at you for doing - lying, stealing, killing, siding with the bad guy - they do themselves, at the drop of a hat, as long its in the service of collecting PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS OMG ARTIFACTS.

Snap is a good card game run by a bad humans. That's as plain as I can say it.

You might think that's not such a big deal, but Snap is a free-to-play game, and when you mix bad people with the monetization that already exists in mobile/f2p games, woooo-eeeee~ it's a minefield. And no matter how long I'm in a minefield, I will never suggest anyone else follow me into it.

Edit 11/24: It just keeps getting worse. It's barely even a game now, it's mostly just a Marvel themed monetization scheme.

I have a couple hundred hours in Rise on the Switch, and I couldn't wait to start over on pc, so, yes, I recommend it. I recommend Monster Hunter, in general. There are no bad Monster Hunter games.

This version of Rise marks the first time I've ever played a Monster Hunter game with truly fantastic graphics, and I don't want ever to go back.

If I had a complaint to level, it would be about the DLC. There's a gratuitous amount of it. And it's almost all boring. Not Sunbreak. Sunbreak is great. I mean all the weird little hats and belts and stuff. For a game that has always had excellent art direction, they sure manage to float a lot of dumb content for their micro-transactions.