Recent reviews by Pvt. Parts

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IMPAIR YOUR ABILITY TO DRIVE?
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I'm just here for the Blackjack game, the rest of the game is good or whatever but Banned Footage Vol. 2 is where the gold is.

The game itself is "fine", runs pretty well, maps are visually readable and understandable, a lot of care has been taken to ensure that this game a serious competitive experience.

The issue becomes that there are so many smaller issues that spring up that make the game feel like a chore.

Some of these "chores" could be handled better, while some are a bit more difficult to handle.

Chore 1: the playerbase is a complete coinflip and any matches you get could either be completely fine, a really good time, or a total waste of everyone's time.

You can expect to get quite a wide selection of people for the matchmaking system to put you with and up against, except there's no component of said system that you're getting teammates worth playing with or opponents worth versing.

All it takes to completely mess up a whole competitive match (and casual by extention) is for some whiner to throw a tissy fit over quite literally nothing, put their teammates down, not contribute to helping the team, or to just be simply not playing at their best, and that can really harm the game's experience both in a competitive and casual context.

A lot of players are super likely to have a full on meltdown and having a bad mental state for your team just makes the situation worse, which a lot of players don't seem to understand, especially in lower ranks.

Chore 2: the game expects way too much coordination and cooporation between players and then punishes players for not coordinating or cooporating.

Sure, if people just used their common sense and learned to be aware, that system might help, but you can probably presume that it doesn't because not everyone is the most aware and common sense might not be so common depending on who you ask.

The game does not heavily consider this nor does it allow you to have any room for error, unless your opponents are making plenty of mistakes too, except that shouldn't be something that a team should be counting on.

That said, there are communication systems built into the game which let you communicate without needing to say a word and instead just use "pings" and "radio commands", but some people don't spend the time to learn how to use them and they are more likely to be missed instead of just typing or using voice chat.

The game really does try to make the game feel friendlier, but there's no system in place to keep the irritants away from people who actually want to play the game outside of a "just report them" mentality.

From experience, both low and high ranks can have completely competent players and it is more than possible to play both with and around your teammates, but some players make it actually impossible.

Chore 3: the ranking system doesn't help either, it's in dire need of a rework and the whole wide-queue system for 5v5 is helpful when you do have lower ranked friends you want to play competitive with, but it is almost never worth it given that all it takes is for one player to completely ruin your chances at any potential team fights or holding a point.

6v6 is a lot better to play in both competitive and casual contexts and it being "open queue" (as in you can pick your own roles, in case you didn't know) makes it way easier to pick up the slack if another player is struggling.

5v5 overall is a lot harder and a lot less enjoyable, it can be a good time, but you really do need a good team or you will get stuck in what ends up being a complete and utter waste of time 90% of the you enter the matchmaking queue.

It's too easy to get skill-gapped teams where one team is just better than the other, the gamemodes are either boring or tedious, with payload maps being by far the best and flashpoint being by far the worst, everything else exists between those two.

The lack of new maps and modes being brought in makes playing the same thing over and over again lame (even though a new map is being brought in soon at the time of writing), especially considering a heap of older modes are still in the game, but are just not playable in competitive but are stupidly instead "limited time gamemodes" with casual settings.

In any case, the game has its highlights and is overall a much better experience today than it was in 2016, but the modes, maps, matchmaking, and even the balancing needs some serious effort put in to releave some of the stresses, otherwise you could easily sink a good couple hundred hours into this game if you find it's your thing.

Given it's free, it may be worth trying out anyway, just be ready to spend a good while learning the mechanics before you find yourself actually having fun.

Good fun, runs well, basically plays like Tarkov if it was a total conversion mod for Insurgency: Sandstorm.

AI isn't a major pain to deal with, the maps are detailed, weapons feel fine with no egregious mechanics trying to "challenge" you, a lot of effort has already been poured into the game in it's current state as well, the future of this game is quite promising.

However, it isn't the most complete experience, which is to be expected for Early Access, but if it's on sale, I see no reason to skip it.

That's kind of the only problem I have so far really, there's no real incentive to progress nor is there much depth to many of the mechanics, but the game is getting updates and is slowly becoming more and more interesting.

If you're more into the solo play aspect of games like this, you will have a good time as the game doesn't try to punish you for exploring when you have no idea what you're doing.

Although, I do wish the stakes in co-op were raised a bit, being able to revive a teammate who died is helpful but kind of makes the whole risk to reward arc feel a bit flat, even if revives require a specific item to do (which isn't hard to find).

The falloff of Battlefield 6 needs to be studied.

I wish there was a "neutral" option for if I recommend the game or not, I absolutely had a good time with it closer to launch and was really impressed initially but as of recent, it hasn't been something I'd want to invest my free time into.

This game is like looking at the arse of a porn model, at first you think it's great, smooth, and something you want to spend plenty of time with, but then you begin to notice the stray hairs and the pimples, and the odd smear of brown here and there.

Performance jumps between really good to really inconsistent depending if Dice updated the game on a Tuesday, hit detection has been "improved" repeatedly but the damage graph I always have on-screen says otherwise, the campagin is nothing particularly interesting, but at least the multiplayer maps are generally good and have plenty of opportunities and routes to experiment with.

The people whining that this isn't Battlefield 4 should just stick to Battlefield 4.
There are definitely highlights to this game, as I mentioned already, the levels are pretty interesting, the guns are good fun to mess around with but the selections leaves a lot to be desired, the selection of multiplayer gamemodes is great too as all the "typical" Battlefield gamemodes are covered and generally work well, the progression system is also pretty alright too.

However, the gunplay is fine but in the context of multiplayer, it is ruined by a mix of RNG recoil patterns (or weapon bloom) and that bipolar hit detection system lead to plenty of situations where a shot that should have (or even did have) landed on your screen, didn't.

Vehicles can be obnoxious (paritcularly if your teammates just came out of the dementia ward and don't know how to react to a tank sweeping the entire map) but not nearly as obnoxious as what we saw in 2042, the voice acting is a bit hit or miss but who cares, just turn off the voices if its bothersome, and while the game is pretty alright when it comes to how buggy it is, when it does bug out, it bugs out hard.

EA's anti-cheat tries to be the most secure anti-cheat it can be by requiring Secure Boot to be enabled, which is fine if you have a modern, up to date Windows based PC, if you're on Linux or using an older PC, good luck playing the game without having to go through a bunch of hoops just to get to the main menu.

There was also one occurance I had where the anti-cheat just stopped working, locking me out of the game completely and silently failing with no errors.

Included with the game is an anti-cheat "updater" which can be used to recover a broken installation, only problem is that the updater that comes with the game doesn't actually fix anything, instead you'd have to download a newer version from EA's own website, for some reason.

Given I haven't seen many cheaters myself, I do think the anti-cheat is doing its job well, despite its shortcommings.

Further on that, the anti-cheat will also sometimes prevent the game from starting normally if something in your PC can't be recognised, say a USB stick or a device without a driver.

EA Support seemingly have no idea how to help with this despite this issue being documented on EA's own forums, so if you suddenly can't connect to the game servers with a "Connection failed" message appearing instantly, check Device Manager for any erroneous devices, otherwise good luck troubleshooting.

The issue I have is that I get why this is a thing, but its not gracefully implemented nor does it seem like anyone bothered to make it something the end-user can attempt to address without spending 3 hours on learning what "Vendor IDs" are and for what vendor they're for.

I really do wish the game would be better but given that EA is now (for some reason) laying off a bunch of Battlefield developers, I fear the game will go down the Payday 3 route of bare-minimum updates and a dwindling playerbase.

In any case: please for the love of god, do not pay full price for this, sales don't happen often so far and they don't drop the price by any substantial amount but if you must play this hunk of slag with a sticker that says "I'm trying to be better" on it, wait for some sort of discount.

Or you can just ask some Polish key merchants, or another means of playing through the use of connecting your PC directly to the fibre cables under your street, I'm not you.

There's plenty of Backrooms games on Steam but this one is one of the nicer ones. Visuals are great, the handcam is a fun little gimmick, and the LiDAR level is probably the highlight for me though. The puzzles are a bit too easy if I'm honest and the enemies are not very threatening.

There's more complete Backrooms games available, although, what's here is fine. In addition to new levels (which 3 are confirmed for the next update), a difficulty tweak would probably go a long way.

Interesting little game, even if it is more like a toy in state that it is currently in. The visuals are fantastic, the game runs surprisingly well, at least on an RTX 3080 and an i7 8700. Not really a whole lot going on outside of just exploring, admiring, and throwing balls at things.

I had decided to try and find ways to break the physics because I had realised after 15 minutes, I had seen everything the game has to offer, and there's some interesting prop flying you can get working but only on certain props. I even managed to find functional lights in the front garden, even though you can't get there without prop flying over the invisible wall which keeps you from leaving the kitchen to get into the back garden.

Really hope we get some new maps, maybe some puzzle minigames which involve the visuals in some way, or even some kind of modding tool to mess around with. While I also would like to see VR, I think just having more maps or more things to do in the game is more important right now. Even if the game was updated to contain even more detail to the level in terms of intractability, sure the PC turning on is cool but can I flush the toilet? Or pull the covers off the beds? Maybe even implement a functional stove top? In any case, while fun for a bit, this is something you would likely only play for a little while, enjoy it, and then move on, because there really is not much here right now.

tl;dr its a cool little sandbox/toy simulation with some very good visuals but there's not a whole lot more going on, still interesting to mess around with for a bit

Profit quota: 512/513
Deadline: 0 days

The System Shock remake manages to capture the same tension and stress of playing the original game and, as you would expect of a remake, does it better. Of course, the original game was a DOS game which had the same visual complexity as a piece of graph paper and was intended to be played on a CRT with the resolution of an ant's knob, but even then, given the aged visuals the original game still manages to hold up even today.

I honestly didn't expect the remake to add nearly as much detail to the environments given the source material and it really goes to show how much creative energy went into this remake which makes this feel like a real passion project.

Meanwhile, the music is more ambient than groovy but the game still manages a serious amount of atmosphere emanating from it. With the dark corridors and distant cyborg mumbles, the music is what ends up being the big red bow which ties up the atmosphere into a beautiful recently bashed mutant corpse.

Even then, it is a bit of a shame that we didn't get full blown recreations of the original music. One of the highlights of the original game was how it manages to get the music to be so up beat yet manages to compliment a sci-fi horror setting. Some may argue the music was a little too much for what was going on and I would imagine that critique is what lead to the remake having a more quiet, ambient soundtrack.

Meanwhile, while I do feel that the visual style is a good fit for the remake, I'm not entirely with the textures having that low resolution look to them as to compliment the original game. Sure, its cute but with a game which has put the effort into completely modernising the visuals from the original game, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to make the environments feel more realised.

Granted, this pixel-ey look isn't always visible, especially at a distance, so its not like it disrupts immersion or anything (except when you notice it on your player's hands and weapons) but it feels that the visuals are being slightly held back by this decision, but that's whatever. Its usually going to be a per-case thing if you do or don't like this sort of thing, and in this case, I don't like it.

Another thing that really disappointed me was the Restoration Bays, or the respawn points if you're not sure what those are. In the original game, a simple yet charming text-to-speech voice announces that you have finally reached what is arguably the most important area on every level. Hearing that robotic voice say the words "CYBORG CONVERSION CANCELLED. STANDARD RESTORATION PROCEDURES ONLINE" is on the same level as reaching a safe room in a Resident Evil game or reaching an extract with 4 blacked out limbs with two tank batteries stuffed into your backpack in Tarkov. Although now, it's got proper voice acting, and while that may seem better, the new voice doesn't really give the feeling of relief the same way the original's did, but now that's just nitpicking.

In any case, this is a very good package. Its true to the original game and aims to preserve the original's design whilst also making modern improvements. There's also a lot of System Shock 2 influence in here too, maybe a little too much for someone coming from the original game though.

There's now actual inventory management and a scrapping mechanic that lets you exchange useless items for useful items at vending machines. What I found myself doing is picking up everything that wasn't nailed to the ground and acquiring tokens for my scrap collection but realised I wasn't even bothering to spend those tokens on anything.

See, once you activate the respawn area on each level and find a Sparc Gun along with memorising every recharge station on that level, you kind of don't have to worry as much about dying. And then I realised that the items I was picking up just weren't worth the time to scrap and then exchange.

I appreciate the idea of making previously useless items useful but given how quickly you can progress once you figure out what you're doing, I realised that I'd rather play an area out tactically and stack up on health items than to keep taking detours to navigate the almost maze-like level design. Yes, the original game was like this too but the original game had you backtrack for something you either missed or had to backtrack for.

Overall, it might be something newcomers to the series or those not too fond of the horror genre might find a bit too much to handle, not to worry because the game offers up the same difficulty configuration options that the original game had meaning you can play the game as relaxed as James May filing and organising drill bits or you can play the game like you had sat on an agitated wasp.

In the end though, the System Shock remake ticks off pretty much every box for a game of its genre and I can safely say, I'm quite satisfied with the base asking price, if you're not someone who knows a whole lot about System Shock, I'd say wait for sale. The remake caters to fans of both the original System Shock and the sequel and tries to do what it can to be as modernised as possible.