Chris Jarrard
This is a bad game. It's not worth $20 and, in my opinion, not worth $5, unless you're the kind of person that would get a kick out of Paris Hilton slut jokes in 2018 and can't get enough lazy, casual racism. A lack of cooperative multiplayer outright dooms the title, forcing it be be endured alone by those unlucky (or stupid) enough to buy it. I'm honestly shocked that Shaq lent his name and voice to this turd pile. My guess is that he cashed the check and hasn't seen the game. A disclaimer opens the game stating that the events depicted don't represent Shaq's views or opinions and that those who take issue with the content of the game shouldn't bother him. It's almost like the developers knew ahead of time that all of this was a bad idea and expect backlash to be directed towards O'Neal. Nice work, guys. 2/10 low-effort dick jokes.
I played the PC version of Conan Exiles for the purposes of this review. From the perspective of a fairly demanding PC nerd, I found the game to be more than adequate. While it has lots of the classic rough edges common to survival games, it can be outright beautiful at times. I encountered no performance issues on my machine during play and the game has all the graphical options and settings you'd expect from a competent PC release. The game works well with high resolutions, ultrawide configurations, and high refresh rates. I found it to be very playable with the Xbox One S controller, though I used a mouse and keyboard for the majority of my time. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4, so users can expect the usual strong point or quirks common to games that license this popular engine.
As it stands right now, Super Mega Baseball 2 is now the top dog of baseball games on the PC.
Call of Duty: WW2 is competently made by a skilled team. I just wish some of that talent and skill could be put towards anything other than this yearly pile of linear shooting rehash. The game runs well and is very playable, so things aren't all that bad, they just feel soulless. All I could think of while playing is how I would rather be killing Nazis in Wolfenstein 2. 5/10 sad violin interludes
This game should not be fun. It has almost everything except its phenomenal mud and vehicle physics working against it. Often unfriendly to the point of misery, Mudrunner asks a lot from those who chose to engage it, but like many classic tough games, success simply feels sweeter. The music choices and achievement prompts are straight out of a PS1-era extreme sports title, but hearing the faint sound of butt rock as you near a lumber mill with your final load of logs re-invigorates you like seeing light after eons of darkness. This is the closest we'll ever get to a video game based on William Friedkin's classic thriller Sorcerer. If you are a fan of non-conventional PC games, I cannot recommend Spintires:Mudrunner enough. 9/10 mudcaked super swampers
I dislike so many parts of the game. Giant chunks of it are littered with tired mechanics and missions filled with tedium. I even experienced the patented Assassin's Creed PC version at launch problems. It has a real money store where you can buy in-game credits to speed up your progress and some of the progression makes me feel like it was engineered to get me to buy these credits. ACO has almost everything going against it, and somehow managed to win me over. Just moving along in the game world is rewarding on its own.
For WWE fans, there is a lot to like with the package, but ultimately, bad design cripples what could be a real winner. While I was not the biggest fan of them, the removal of the showcase events is a huge loss for longtime wrestling fans. The game still lacks any kind of decent general manager mode and offers players no way to set up and book their own fantasy wrestling shows. This mode was included in the series many years ago, so it shouldn't be that tough to get it working on this generation of consoles/PC. On the gameplay side of things, 2K is still falling way short of the fun and simulation aspects of much simpler WWE games from the 1990s. Only the most hardcore WWE fans should apply. On a scale of 10, the PC version is probably two full points better than the console versions. I wish it wasn't true, but it's damn true. 5/10 Phenomenal Forearms
Castellanos pushes through the twisted world in the hunt for Lily, encountering new faces, old faces, disgusting nightmare faces, and a semen monster. By the end of it all, I couldn't remember half of what happened and had no desire to explore STEM for a second time on a higher difficulty. Reducing the amount of bullets is not going to make the experience more compelling.
I'm not sure if Dream Daddy is just a simple visual novel or a commentary on some social issue. Is it all a fever dream? Was there some nefarious explanation for the weirdness and coincidence of the proximity to all the hot gay dads? Did I let my mixed emotions about losing touch with my college-bound daughter drive me to explore a sexual side of me that I never knew existed? Was I secretly gay beforehand and masterminded the entire move to Maple Bay to satisfy a kink?
Objectively, Forza Motorsport 7 is an excellent game. It has the looks, the sounds, and the feel of a champion. In my opinion, it does not look as good as Forza Horizon 3 in many areas, but I can overlook that due to how it is structured and how well it performs. I don't believe it is as good a game as Forza Horizon 3, despite having much better tracks, but would not hesitate to recommend the console version to any driving game fan. Had I not experienced the aforementioned performance issues, I would be inclined to give Forza Motorsport 7 my highest recommendation for PC players. As things stand now, I cannot give it any higher than a 6/10. If a patch arrives in a timely fashion (the 8 months it took to fix Horizon 3 is unacceptable) that addresses the performance problems, I would have no issues with a 9/10.
In a year where many games have arrived light on content and heavy on microtransactions, Project Cars 2 feels like a unicorn. Not once during my playing time was I ever prompted to buy cyber currency or shortcuts to locked content. For players engaged with the simulation-style approach, the amount of options and ways to customize the experience are staggering. The front end menus are bursting with toggles and sliders. While I did not test the game with a VR headset, Oculus and Vive users will be presented with a vast amount of options and can launch the game directly into VR modes via Steam. Graphics setting junkies will find an exhaustive assortment of configuration possibilities, including the fine-tuning of the post-processing features that obscure the field of view, like lens flares, dirt, or raindrops.
This is a must play for fans of the genre or anyone looking for a solid scare.