Recent reviews by Kurt Russell

I had high hopes (this is the team that made Black Mesa after all) but sadly what we currently have isn't very fun to play. Lots of things collide with your bullets but the enemy can shoot through them with no issues. Ammo boxes sometimes exist, but most of the time they are fake (they give you an interact prompt that does nothing). Unfun enemy types get sometimes spammed like crazy for no apparent reason (why would I be swarmed by 3 heavies at the extract, when I'm already being swarmed by less powerful enemies?) Pick one, not both.
There's a pre-match tactics map but it doesn't really get used during the match, again, why?
Performance can be very iffy even on a modern system (9800x3d, 32gb, 4080)
Hopefully it will improve, but right now I can't recommend it.

I had to eat Shoes to survive, but I couldn't make it. :ablobsalute:

Runs surprisingly well for an Unreal Engine 5 game (admittedly on a modern machine that should have no trouble with it, but we all know how that goes)
No shader compilation stutter, locked 60fps at 1440p max settings DLSS Quality (on a 4080, 9800x3d, 32gb setup)
Gameplay-wise, it's the original game with updated controls, but the AI seems to still be the one from the PS2 version, which in my opinion is a great thing. No weird open world colectathon stuff, just Snake Eater with modern graphics.

For the bad things, it's locked to 60fps, and there's no ultrawide support if you got one of those fancy new monitors.

Pretty fun (and fairly long) campaign, perhaps a bit too heavy on the puzzle side, but still very entertaining. A bunch of QoL changes alongside it, some of them good in theory but we'll see in practice, others good with no visible drawbacks.
The story for Edge of Fate is intriguing enough to make me interested in what's starting, and the new character isn't a Nimbus type annoying out of place Marvelization. We'll see how the raid goes, but so far I'm more than satisfied.

Elden Ring but it's on crack and you'd better bring friends. Everything except the boss fights is massively sped up, and there's a BR-like ring of fire making you think twice about where you go for optional bosses and estus upgrades.

The most interesting part? it's surprisingly cohesive. It just "works" 99% of the time, with that other 1% being tiny annoyances like finnicky lock on when you want to revive allies, weird framedrops, etc.
But the game part just magically works fine. There's obviously things I'd like to see that aren't yet here (better solo balancing for scrubs like me, though that's debatable, a duos mode, and what's sadly a pipe dream, but a dream nonetheless: crossplay). Still, a great time for a budget price in an age where games are starting to go for eighty bucks and up.

Runs like a dream, looks gorgeous, and above all, it's still a blast to play, even if they went for a different approach here. Only thing I'm missing is some Mick Gordon goodness, but the new composers did an excellent job all things considered. Just haven't really heard any super memorable track, but also nothing out of place.

Somehow, this is the same old Oblivion with modern graphics and not much else (they did mix up the leveling system with Skyrim's, but the core of the Oblivion system is still the base, which is great). The same old jank (or charm, to people like me who played this way back) is still very much present in this graphically updated re-release.
Performance-wise, if you don't ♥♥♥♥ around with Lumen stuff it runs pretty well, but enabling ultra HW RT Lumen brought my framerate down to the high 50s on a 4080 at 1440p.

Still, this is exactly the game I remembered, with cosmetic changes and not much else. And that's exactly what I wanted. Todd wins again, I guess!

I liked the first game but never saw it as a "must play" (in my mind it's a very respectable 8/10). The sequel had a lot of baggage with its player reception, but I figured that I'd give it a shot anyway since even the people who hate it will tell you that gameplay-wise it's a better game.

What did I think? I honestly feel this is a better game than the first in most aspects. Story-wise, I think it has too many flashbacks, but outside of that I thought it was great. The gameplay is markedly better (though friendly AI is still mostly trash and can take you out of the experience very quickly). Graphically, it's a pretty good looking game with a well defined art style, and it runs very well on PC, especially considering that the first game's PC port was apparently terrible at launch (I played the game on PS3 and then PS4, so can't confirm that myself)

But yeah, overall I'd actually highly recommend this one, especially if you are someone who liked the first but don't have it in your top 10 games ever or something like that.

Nioh and Assassin's Creed had a baby, and somewhere along the way they got some Way of the Samurai DNA just because why not.
It has some performance issues when not using upscaling (which has sadly become the norm nowadays). Having a blast though, in the first hour they gave me a gun, a grappling hook and a glider. There's the now classic Nioh loot overload which isn't the best, but there are options to auto dismantle stuff, which is nice. The story so far is the usual where you meet a bunch of historical figures and go on unlikely adventures.

oh no