Recent reviews by Bif

Elden Ring is griefer paradise. If you play co-op, you will be attacked by a much higher level griefer and you will be killed. Might take an hour for one to find you. There is absolutely no way you can turn this off. This game is basically cheater's paradise but without needing to cheat. Griefers can simply hop from game to game killing PvE players until their antisocial urges are satisfied.

Play this game if you want to be repeatedly jumped by nasties.

Borderlands is a decent looter-shooter which will show you a good time if you have the proper mindset. The combat works well and is fun, although it's simplistic by today's standards. Loot is plentiful and fun to rummage through for the occasional useful tidbits. Questing is subpar, but you're not here for the quests, are you?

The standout characteristic of Borderlands is its personality. Behind the cartoony rotoscoped graphics is some better-than-average artwork which is melancholy, isolated, and whimsical. NPCs are failures and broken, like the land itself. Much of the voice acting seems to be the same talented individual who frequently nailed it. On top of this broken, ruined land and its equally ruined people sits a layer of crass, ruthless culture. Or what passes for a culture. Largely in the background, there are elements of over-the-top consumerism and end stage corporate competition. These elements are presented in a funny voice and are clearly intended to be humorous, but it mostly falls flat.

The overall effect, however, is a sense of place and time that are remarkably vivid. You're going to feel like you went somewhere and did something out of the ordinary. This aspect of the game, its "feel", is the one thing they got unarguably right.

Try to grab the "enhanced" version of the game. Decent maps and a usable minimap are no small addition to the game. I also noticed a lot more ambient loot, like lootboxes that actually open. It's more fun.

The humor is sometimes a bit fringe/cringe but honestly you'd have to be overly thin-skinned to be offended.

EA Background Service runs on your computer 24/7 with root access & elevated privileges, supposedly to improve the user experience by preloading patches & such. So you should ask yourself: Do you trust EA Games, purveyor of pay to win microtransactions, destroyer of great game studios, premature server shutdown specialists, with root access & elevated privileges on your computer?

You should not trust them, EA Games has no soul & only exists to maximize profits. If you don't ask for or even authorize intrusive potentially predatory software, that software is malware. Spyware. Rogue. The fact that the EA Background Service installs without permission & runs 24/7 with no provision for turning it off or opting out means this is a drive-by installation, a hack. It should be illegal, if in fact it's not already illegal.

As to the Mass Effect games you get along with the spyware, they seem fine. The same as I remember. Frankly, without the spyware I think Mass Effect holds up pretty well.

But then there is that malware, the EA Background Service. It's a non-starter.

A game of below average quality, not too bad, lurks behind massive walls of timesuck. The timesuck is walking, mostly, with a generous side dish of inventory management.

Your avatar does not sprint. Nor does he run. A slow jog is the best you will get out of him--which has many negative impacts on the game such as enemies easily running you down or evading to regain health. But the main effect is to take the long journeys baked into V Rising and ensure such journeys take a long time. Combine this with a map that is cut into long time-wasting corridors by 5-meter cliffs, ensuring you must take lengthy detours to go anywhere. While there are a few fast travel locations along the edges of the map, these seldom reduce travel time as they are inconveniently located. Well over half of your playtime will be spent walking--not fun.

Inventory management smells exactly like a Bethesda game like Fallout 76. You have a small carry capacity, stacks are small, and there are thousands of inventory items that serve the same purpose but do not stack. This necessitates returning to your base every half hour or you could rummage through your inventory continually to throw out things you are carrying that aren't critically important. Trust me, you will never need 20 stacks of rugged hide. The issue remains timesuck, as you could run back to your base and dump stuff there or you could spend the same amount of time continually sorting your inventory. Either way, it sucks. It sucks time.

Let's say you don't mind endless walking and rummaging through inventory. How fun is the game if you ignore the turds in the punchbowl, disregarding time spent walking and managing inventory? Not very.

Your point of aim is toward the mouse pointer, which disappears when you face toward it. It is ridiculously annoying to hit anything in this game. All combat (aside from trivial combat) involves AOE+ranged attacking bullet-sponges with continual adds. The bosses look different, but they are effectively clones. Progression is entirely dependent on fighting special souped-up bosses that are especially annoying. Killing anything else is pointless in this game.

If you want a game like this, save yourself a lot of aggravation and go play a much better survival game. I'd recommend Enshrouded for a similar vibe, but Left4Dead and 7 Days to Die are even better.

Not recommended, with serious problems that outweigh the parts of the game that work. Corpse runs aggravate, stamina-based combat ensures eventual defeat, food accounts for nearly all health & stamina, & fast travel is only available if you're not carrying anything useful. If you can stand all that time suck & irritation, the game is okay. Then your friends cheat.
--Corpse running means all your gear drops & you get to skinny dip your way across the ocean to recover your gear as well as the food you need to have any health. More on that later. The monsters or hazards that killed before you lost all your gear are guaranteed to be guarding your corpse. Good luck.
--Stamina-based combat means every time you block, dodge, attack, even hop you obliterate your small reservoir of stamina; when that stamina bar hits zero you can't do any of this & you die. Separately, it is easy to get stun locked when your separate stunlock bar hits zero. Then you die.
--Food determines your health & stamina. Make sea serpent stew, increase your health & stamina by a factor of 10. The problem is that farming isn't fun & it takes a lot of time. Cooking isn't fun & it also takes a lot of time. You will be doing a lot more farming & cooking than playing.
--Fast travel is via portals made from rare-ish middle game materials. The problem is that you cannot carry ores, metals, & similar mid-tier materials through portals. So, effectively, portals are irrelevant.
--So you retrieved your corpse, spent most of your game time making stamina food, & moved your entire base next to your next resource. For a glorious moment, you will probably have a good time making bases, murdering the indigenous population, & stealing their stuff. Got to admit this can be fun. Lots of fun.
--Then your feckless friend starts handing out next-tier gear like an elitist super gamer. How amazingly skilled he is! Except he got all that stuff using console commands & if you locked that down he just moved to his own solo universe & filled his pockets there. Yeah maybe time to make different friends. But the challenge of the biome is ruined even when you turn down the generous (cheat) gifts because you friend is now a cool elitist gamer that has all that stuff on him. Why, exactly, can't we select to have characters saved with the server & unable to port off & back with all the goodies?
--There are definitely moments to be had in this game. But of the survival/adventure games, to the best of my knowledge, this one is the most annoying. Enshrouded, Abiotic, even Conan are all much better games. Skip this one.

Returnal is a rogue-like game in which each time you die the game gets significantly more difficult. Perfection must be maintained or your run is screwed, you cannot misstep or take the slightest damage or the run is broken due to losing your accumulated damage multiplier. Bullet hell combines with high platforms or nearby deadly environments such as lava or water, meaning it is easy to dodge into damage or death. Yes, water is as deadly as lava. Strafe off an edge or into damage and you lose. And the next run will be harder.
In other words, this game sucks. On the very basic level of "Is it Fun", no. It is not fun. It's aggravating, frustrating, contrary, unfair, & a massive timesuck. Other than that, you might notice between 3-hour failed runs the gameplay is good, on par with Destiny 2. The art direction is consistent & very good. But since you are a very bad mom going mad for your sins, you deserve the horrible waste of lifespan that is Returnal.
Read the positive reviews with great skepticism. These are elitist jokers laughing up their sleeves because they are cooler than you. Unless you are an elitist joker, in which case this game is for you!

This review is from April 21, 2021. Since Fallout 76 is on online game under continuous (very gradual) development, its applicability may taper off over time. I do not recommend Fallout 76 in its current state.

As you can see from my profile, I played the heck out of Fallout 76, and you may think that is a recommendation. Don't think that. Fallout 76 epitomizes every one of my peeves toward poor gaming experiences, starting with far too much drudgery--primarily walking and mucking through inventory. When you add unwanted, unfair pvp and intrusive microtransactions, it all adds up to a hard fail.

Today I logged into Fallout 76 and examined the map for other players. Because all 5 available slots are filled with characters ranging from level 19 to 71, I logged into the lowest-level player. I examined the map for other players but saw none. In a few minutes, I died and a level 376 player taunted my corpse and waited around. I don't know, maybe he wanted to spawn camp. So I uninstalled. Obviously.

I'm not playing this game to pvp. If I was, I don't think the match was very good. My level 19 vs. some random 13-year-old's level 376. So if the game was matchmaking for me to have fun, hard fail. Only a complete idiot would believe the fight between my baby player and a pvp god was accidental or intended to provide me with a fun experience. I was content for the level 376, I was spawned into his instance to be farmed. And I don't find that enjoyable and I have plenty of other things I can do.

And this is what will happen to you. When the game was new, you could compete by playing a lot and having your character be the top level. The game is no longer new. If you start a character or play a character that is not godlike, then you can expect to be farmed by players you cannot hope to compete with. Maybe you're into that. Seems unlikely.

Avoid this game like the plague. If I had not been farmed, I would have spent my time walking and managing inventory, because that is the Bethesda model. Create a somewhat fun game, create time wasting travel and inventory issues for the player, and then charge the player for a subscription that reduces the annoyance that they themselves created for that very purpose.

Horribly broken game, unskippable unfair pvp, vast boring distances, stupidly complex inventory. You would be hard pressed to find more annoyance for less fun. Getting a job at McDonald's will be more fun.

Stay Out is highly Pay to Win (P2W). Until my.com implements P2W features into Will To Live, which they will, you are better off playing Will To Live, right here on Steam.

Since the demise of Szone, two similar games have sprung forth: Stay Out and Will To Live. Will To Live has Unreal engine 4, which is no small improvement. It's more polished. It's also spread out over a large, mostly empty map that looks like central Siberia near Yakutsk to me. The problem is that my.com has recently purchased Will To Live, and its fate is very much up in the air. You can count on my.com heavily monetizing Will To Live, eventually. Stay Out is already monetized to the max.

Health packs, silent guns, higher-power ammunition, special super armor, XP and loot boosters--basically any unfair advantage that should not be in a PvP game is fully implemented and gleefully abused in Stay Out. Leave here right now and go play Will To Live until my.com screws it up.

Stay Out used to be called Stalker Online. It appears to be descended from Szone. Stay Out definitely shares inspiration and probably shares code with Will To Live. Stay Out has most of the same flaws as most other Russian online games--bad animation, no story to speak of, noob victimizing culture, and a low fun to timesuck ratio--and it is on an older engine with fewer amenities than Will To Live. But Stay Out is maximum P2W, and Will To Live isn't.

The bad animation is just the state of the art in Russia. They will probably catch up eventually. But for now, it is a little jarring to go from Red Dead Redemption to Stay Out. Especially when the avatar's default position is all limbs sticking out at 30 degrees like a kid making a snow angel.

The bad story is also, unfortunately, the norm in Russian games. They take a good book, in this case Roadside Picnic (google it if you're curious), and they take all of the plot and character development out of the book. What's left, you ask? Actually some very good work in atmosphere and mood. They nailed the mood of Roadside Picnic, which is a very cool book. But everything else is missing.

This is an always-on PVP game with a mild karma system to somewhat discourage players from killing each other. I got killed by other players a lot. Sometimes the player-killer was just higher level and thus better equipped, but increasingly as you get further into the game, they are unkillable twinks armed with mom's credit card and a bad Pay to Win cash shop.

The majority of players are pleasant, and some are helpful. For example, a Russian resuscitated my character. This good Samaritan spent a medpack on me (which costs in-game money) and he derived no benefit from helping me. So there are good people and bad people, it's a mixed bag. There are enough player killers in the game that you will die at least every hour or so in the second zone, Luibeck, depending on the time of day.


The game is disrespectful of players' time. Not as bad as Will To Live, because Stay Out has a densely-populated urban environment whereas Will To Live is out in the wilds of central Siberia. But Stay Out will waste much more time than any game you will encounter. Stay Out is even worse that that infamous inventory-management game by Bethesda, Fallout 76.

Here is how my time in game was spent:

80% walking from one place to another. The infamous digital walking simulator. Thirst makes this a lot worse. In about half an hour, your character gets thirsty and can no longer run or jump. You get thirsty really fast. And when you a thirsty, you walk slow. It's about half speed. Also, for maybe five minutes after you die, you walk even slower than the slow thirsty walk.

15% of my time was spent waiting for progress bars. For example, when you loot an animal you must wait for a progress bar called Butchering or Harvesting. Well, harvesting is plants. Butchering takes 15-20 seconds. It is really amazingly slow.

5% of my time was spent reloading the Nagant 1895 pistol. You start the game with a Nagant, and it is the only weapon you get for the first 20 hours of the game. In real life, the Nagant is the most amazing pain in the rear to reload, easily taking a minute to extract the brass and insert new shells. This ultra-slow reload is modeled faithfully in the game. You could save yourself a whole lot of aggravation by refusing to play any game with Nagant pistols in it. Things do get better when you do the convoluted and lengthy series of quests to unlock the Tukarov pistol, which has a clip. Much better, but you still can't just reload it, you have to reload the clips individually in inventory.

The dogs and rats that inhabit the first few areas of the game are well aware that the player cannot shoot while reloading, and they attack as soon as you begin the long, tedious process of replacing cartridges. And nothing interrupts the reloading process (although I found that if you hold down the right mouse button, it will eventually break loose). So you die frequently while reloading the Nagant pistol.

Wait, you say, you had to have had SOME fun. All of the time wasting, soul stifling activities you listed add up to 100%! The thing is, I like shooting enemies and stealing...err, looting...their stuff. Shooting is almost entirely 'reloading' in this game, and looting is this long, drawn-out progress bar thing. They have taken the things I like to do in games and made them into boring time sucks.

I love Stalker-style games, but the timesuck elements are annoying. I think many players have wandered off the ranch, and become committed cannibals, taking delight in aggravating and frustrating their playmates.

Still, Stay Out does nail the Stalker ambience and mood. So if you can put up with the many negatives, you will feel like a Stalker, or at least I did. You would be far better served firing up one of the Stalker single-player games, such as Call of Pripyat. And at least until my.com gets around to monetizing Will To Live, it's a better game right now.

INSTANT UNFAIR DEATHS WITH LONG TIMESUCK PUNISHMENT FOR DYING

RUN AWAY from 'Will to Live'. "Want to Die?" is a much more accurate name for this game. This is a "LEARN BY DYING" game. All dangers are instant death with a severe death penalty (time suck and lost items). Death has no warning, and can be absolutely random, such as you will literally be struck by lightning, which like all other hazards, instantly kills you. Then the game respawns you far away, minus some of your stuff.

The Game wastes vast amounts of your time on by making you walk through big empty zones. Although there are a few hidden teleport 'anomalies', there is no remotely useful fast travel system. You will die frequently, without warning or explanation.You will do a LOT of walking.

Here is the main gameplay loop:
1. The game kills you FREQUENTLY, unfairly, randomly, without warning. You never take damage, you just drop dead.
2. The game teleports you way back at the last town or place where you changed zones, generally ten minutes away.
3. The game never tells you why you died. The notice will say either:
a) "You committed suicide." ...Sarcastic.
b) "You died." ...Unhelpful.
4. You will die again.

Maybe you will figure out what killed you. Definitely you will squander far too much time walking through the NOT VERY INTERESTING central Siberian landscape.

There are rats, dogs, and pigs to fight. Unlike environmental hazards, which always kill you outright, hostile critters can wound you without instantly killing you. Yet when critters kill you, which they frequently do, you still lose a bunch of stuff and have to trudge back from the last zone point.

NEGATIVE REVIEWS

Since this is not my first time writing a negative review, I'm leaving comments off. Git gud is the obvious such comment. I'm a serious gamer. I took this game seriously. I don't want to spend all my time walking back to where I died. I want others to die, not me, so I can take their stuff. Since that is too much to ask, I will play a different game. This is an honest, but definitely negative review.

EXAMPLE OF BAD GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE

I timed one of the quests, "Gift for Kuzmich". The boatloads of time wasted astounded me.

It took 50 seconds to get from the questgiver to the exit leaving the starter town zone--it's a big, empty town. Then, after 7 minutes of travel toward the quest location, two boars spawned on top of me. I killed the first one. The second one killed me.

So I had to walk that 7 minute walk over again.

Then I was killed by another tag team of boars in a different location. No getting around the boars.

So I had to walk that 7 minute walk over again.

Another 7 minutes later, this time I happened to cross paths with a high-level player who helped kill the boars that again spawned on top of me. Total time to get to Kuzmich, 24 minutes. Was it fun? NO. It might have been fun without the 3 times I walked for 7 minutes. But the inexcusable, excessive walking eradicated all traces of fun.

AVOID THIS GAME

I gave this game a lot of time. I tried to like it. I have learned to dislike this game very much. Most likely, you will too.