Mid game - terrible port.

What was something I was just going to bother with on Game Pass became a birthday gift from a close friend, meaning I tried quite hard to see something in this game and finish it. Sadly, Boltgun is almost everything you shouldn't do in a modern "boomer shooter;" borrowing all the worst ideas from the genre's past and delivering a poor PC port on top of it all.

There is no nice way to say that Boltgun is boring, but it's really boring. Map designs are samey mazes with little visual distinction in either color or structure, leading to the player traversing the same rocky cliffs and military bases over and over again. While the enemies offer a decent variety, the AI pathing is stupid and almost every enemy either stands in place to get blown to bits, or rush you like they have no reason to live, anymore. Spending hours running around the same-looking corridors and cliffs, fighting the same enemies over and over again, all in these giant mazes I get lost in half the time is not my idea of a good time.

Guns are largely a non-starter, either, with no weapon I picked up in my six-hours of playtime grabbing me like anything from QUAKE, DUSK, AMID EVIL, Ion Fury, etc. The drip-feed of weapons is solely that: a drip-feed. There is nowhere near enough variety in the weapons to begin with, but having still not unlocked all weapons at over six-hours of playtime is frustrating for a game like this. I understand the idea of slowly delivering all the surprises, as you don't want to "blow your load early," but it leads to Boltgun feeling like there are no substantial rewards for exploring or just playing normally. This issue is typified with Boltgun not offering any new weapons for nearly three-hours, then giving me two back-to-back; you really couldn't have spaced those out? I would never say I could design/create a game better than this, but I want to know the thought process on the genius who thought that up.

Lastly, I will just be complaining about the PC port, because it's one thing to be playing a "mid" shooter, but to have it run as poorly as it does on PCs that blow far past system recommended specs is unforgivable. As is usual with Unreal 4/5 games, Boltgun suffers from obnoxious stutter struggle with massive frame hitching and performance dips in both predictable and completely random locations. While I am not running a "top of the line rig" by any stretch of the word, my PC should be running this game better than the goddamn Nintendo Switch.

I assumed until now YIIK was a mediocre Earthbound/Persona ripoff with references to a real murder victim's death - like, as some random side-off in the text; a momentary plot incident. I didn't expect that victim to not only be the CORE of this plot, but for Alex YIIKman to be a self-insert of the writer Andrew Allenson (i'm not talking about the character design, I'm talking about his mannerisms being so specific they could only resemble the writer's own personality), AND for Alex to wholesale admit that he's a jobless misogynistic sociopathic conspiracy theorist who masturbates to said murder victim and fantasizes about a relationship with them. Alex's overt narcissism (and by extension, Allenson's) is rewarded with paragraphs upon paragraphs of space to spew whatever mindless ramblings he wants about 'society' - mind you, a society he doesn't participate in, - and besides some incredibly, INCREDIBLY minor reproach he gets from other party members in the story (he calls them friends, lmao), he goes unconfronted about any of this horrible behavior, until the halfway point where the game randomly decides it's an 'I'm seeking redemption' plotline. The story's attempts to make Alex seem like a reconciling, flawed character are impossible to take seriously because the writing refuses to address any of the physical things he does or says as a point of contention: They can only vaguely gesture towards Alex as a 'flawed' individual, not someone who has committed 'X' flaws. The B-plot where his mom calls him out for being a mooch and forcing him to seek a job so they can put food on the table? Ditched a half hour after it gets brought up. Alex telling Rory to fuck off after grieving his dead sister? Gets like two follow-up scenes where Alex looks at the floor and goes 'yeah ummm, I'm sorry for uh, what I diiiiid, y'know??' and then gets dropped again. After characters tell Alex that they think he's 'matured' as a person, he still continues to speak with the same egocentric prose and pomp he always did, and continues showing snide attitude when they open up to him about their lives. All the characters in the story that DO show reproach to him have many of the same character flaws as well - they're equally narcissistic, media-obsessed and hostile. Because as it turns out, if you're an anti-social writer with no friends, it becomes really hard to write your MC's friends as anything but a mirror image of you. The only reason the side characters' selfishness never becomes as bad as Alex is because none of them are given the same screentime as him.

To write a redemption plot takes a lot of work and the right headspace - cause guess what? If you live a bad life, and you haven't changed, but you want to change, chances are your text is gonna reflect the current hostility and aggression you live with - I should know, I wrote miserable terrible webcomics in college. You need hindsight to be introspective about these kinds of topics, you need to actually ACTUALLY change, move on, then look back and handle it with its full weight. It's hard; it's dirty writing; and in most cases, if someone has moved on, they don't have an interest in making cynical works anymore: They want to chase an optimistic future and wipe the slate clean. If the plot is intended to be about YOU, the writer, it's only going to go over well if you're in just the right headspace to say the right thing and resonate with your audience. Yiik was not written in those circumstances. The writer's subsequent tantrums online when people went 'yuuk' at Alex are evidence of this.

Andrew Allenson, if you had any intention to 'get better as a human being', you wouldn't treat Alex's soapboxing and surface-level philosophical banter with such reverence. You were only able to write this story by letting Alex's '''friends''' give him as much rope as he possibly needed until the last minute. You don't truly see your past self as something you want to grow from. It is a privilege to have the time and resources to become an indie developer, and you wasted it by ripping off a game for high schoolers.

(And all of this is without getting into Yiik's numerous mechanical flaws, outright non-functional combat, epilepsy-inducing vfx, AND nightmarishly terrible soundtrack that steals multiple times over from other JRPGs. But being a horrible gamedev isn't as worthy of discussion as being devoid of humanity)

Please stop YIIKing around and move on.

Playtime: 20 Hours
Score: 4/10

A new mainline entry that feels more like Diablo 3.5. So I'm a fan of Diablo as it was the first ARPG I ever played and I even remember the day I got the OG Diablo 2 for my PC and just being blown away by the atmosphere and the fun gameplay, even though by that point the game was several years old. Fast forward years later, I played Diablo 3 when it hit PlayStation and I really enjoyed that game despite it being divisive amongst fans. So what did I think of this one?

To start with the positives, the combat as always is a lot of fun. I played a Necromancer since that was my go to class in Diablo 2 and I had a lot of fun with it, especially once I got the corpse explosion which is always my favorite. I also like that transmog is in this game, which allows you to change the look of all the gear you pick up, so you always look the way you want to. I say that since it was in Diablo 3, but I was worried Blizzard would get very aggressive and paywall the feature each time you want to change the look of an item. I'm glad they at least showed restraint there. The music is also very good with the tracks sounding different to past games but still very epic. And though this is an always online game (more on that later), the game was very stable for me with no server issues and players generally just kept to themselves, so nothing bad there. Lastly I thought Lilith was a cool villain and was a nice change up from just having Diablo come back again.

That's sadly where the positives end for me. The game, while fun, just honestly gets very boring after a while for various reasons. The game is open world with segmented regions, kind of like Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning's open world, but exploration honestly barely felt any different to Diablo 3. You're still running around large open fields, with demons around every corner with the occasional chest tucked away somewhere. There are dungeons, but these are all just copy and pasted, with not much to differentiate them other than what enemies you're fighting in them. Side quests are okay, but I've seen better in other games and these get boring after a while. While the visuals do have a more gothic tone to fit the first two games, it lacks that oppressive atmosphere I felt when I played Diablo 2. It honestly just feels like Diablo 3 with Diablo 1+2 skin over it visually.

Leveling is back to traditional skill trees which I do like as it lets you make different builds within the same class. The issue is once you hit level 50, you stop getting skill points and instead get paragon points which lets you access a separate tree. But most of these are just basic stat upgrades and don't really let you continue to tailor a unique build. The combat is fun like I said it but it quickly starts to feel trivial as the game is just WAY too easy. Why don't you turn up the difficulty you might ask? You can't since this game uses a world tier system similar to Diablo 3 with you only having access to easy and normal at the start with hard and nightmare only unlocking AFTER you beat the main campaign which just sucks man. I get this is a live service game with an MMO feel, but just let me increase my difficulty for god sakes. I am not going to continue to play your game after the main story, so stop trying to dangle higher difficulties like a carrot to me.

Loot is also very basic and boring in this game as most of the time when I found a new weapon, it just felt like a simple stat increase for me and only the legendaries had some cool effects, but these were too far in between.

Another thing they took out from D3 was the companion system which I really missed here. In D3 you got 3 companions who could accompany you when you went out into the world. And while ya these companions were rendered mute if you were playing in co-op, I still liked having them since I mostly play these games in single player. I enjoyed having them with me and then learning more about their backstories when I went back to town. It was something I really missed here.

Lastly is the story, which while interesting, it's not enough to make up for the other issues I mentioned. You do get CG Blizzard cutscenes during the main quests which are always cool to watch, but that's about the only thing they did to enhance the storytelling. I honestly didn't care about most of the side characters and the ones that were decent, I've again seen similar characters in other open world RPGs done better. Also what I found weird is when you talk to NPCs in the game and it's still the top down view point, the camera will zoom in slightly while you talk to them but it's still the top down view, which just felt very pointless to me and after a while it just got annoying. But the actual main story was just okay, as you're mostly just chasing down Lilith and when you get to a location she's at, you learn she's already moved on and then you get a cutscene from her perspective. Again, she's a cool villain but it's not enough to keep my attention with everything else being so bland and I honestly found D3's story to be a lot more engaging. My little hot take for you Diablo fans XD

So ya, that's my thoughts on this game. I'm just not a live service game fan as I feel like they're the bane of the industry and the killer of dev creativity and it just didn't do much to forcibly make Diablo 4 a live service. I didn't talk much about the monetization since the game doesn't force it down your throats but it's still awful with its prices. You want money for horse armor? Get the heck out of here!

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/

Has all the ingredients and charm you expect from a MYST game, but is ultimately less epic and/or satisfying than its immediate predecessor, RIVEN. The story of this one concerns traveling through worlds that were explicitly constructed as games/lessons for someone, so completing the puzzles kind of just for the sake of it (though there is a good reason, in the context of the plot) feels a lot more artificial than manipulating fantastical machinery to unlock the secrets of some lost people or whatever, as in the other games. This time it just feels like levels.

There's some kind of cool graphical trickery being employed now to let you freelook in any direction at each traversal node, despite the world still just being pre-rendered flat images. (I guess the big jpegs must be drawn as spheres that the camera is in the middle of?) Likewise, the FMV scenes with live actors are ... yep, they're still FMV scenes with actors! At least in this one, you've got relatively big name Brad Dourif givin' it both barrels as the villain. And as he is someone who I believe is literally incapable of giving a bad performance, he carries the silliness off as well as possible. He was definitely a good hire.

So, I guess this one was farmed out while the real MYST guys made the more-ambitious next one? If that's the case, it makes sense, given the bit of a dropoff in scope from RIVEN. But it's actually rather impressive that a different team managed to capture the vibe of the series well enough that it does fit in and hold its own just fine.

When Fallout 3 was originally released in 2008, it did not let you continue playing after you finished the game. This notably ruffled a few feathers, so Bethesda, known best for their substantive DLC, released a DLC pack less than a year after its release which rectified the issue. Seven years and some change later, Fallout 4 did not repeat this "mistake." Upon finishing Fallout 4, you're met with a cutscene that's three minutes shorter than what was in Fallout 3, after which the game hastily throws you back into its world. No credits, no real acknowledgment of any of the choices you might have made outside of the main quest. What this ultimately betrays, though, is not what the player spent the last thirty-to-forty to god knows how long doing in the Commonwealth. This single, one-minute cutscene—one of two in the entire game—comes to represent Fallout 4's main points of failure.

A change from F3 and New Vegas that's immediately apparent is that F4 drops the Mad Max style of narration, where the player character has been made into this legend of sorts whose adventures likely get misappropriated and lost in translation by the locals as time wears on. F4's opening and ending cutscenes are in the first person, feature stark, high-contrast imagery, and have heavy, emotional music playing over them. The concept, on paper, is likely that Fallout 4 was meant to be a more investing, personal tale than that of the Courier, who let Fisto have their way with them because it was funny. The voice talent for the player character in F4, god bless both of their hearts, put their souls into reading lines about how their fictional son was missing, and in a vacuum, their efforts pay off. But after the game gives you a tank to walk around in and a minigun to kill a Deathclaw with in its first hour, and then lets you keep both of them, it's hard to tell whether or not the game is taking itself seriously. I would say that the culprit of this is that any power armor set you wear makes the cinematic, Mass Effect-style conversation camera angles feel laughable. It's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a desperate parent when that parent is behind a hundred layers of steel and isn't emoting; The Mandalorian this is not. But ultimately, the conclusion I have to come to is that it's context that neuters the experience of its grain.

Fallout has never had a strong emotional core. I've come to the realization that the reason I see both Fallout and STALKER paired with each other, despite being continents apart in tone, intent, inspiration, lore, and nationality, is that both favor the minutiae of being in their worlds as opposed to the grander scheme of what they're meant to represent on a narrative level. These games are sandboxes, and sandboxes shouldn't be limited by such finicky, human matters. Do you see that bandit camp over there? Clear it for no other reason than it feels good to shoot at mannequins and then loot their remains, and then go back again to do the exact same thing halfway across the map. Therein lies the overarching problem with Fallout 4's narrative structure: it wants to be convinced that it can have those bandit camps, gameplay loops so refined and repetitive you'd think Bethesda was run by Kairosoft with a budget, and something to tug at your heartstrings with. As it so happens, it also desperately wants the Faction system of New Vegas, so that has to fit somewhere into the narrative, too. The end result is too crowded for any one angle to feel sharp. Every possible corner feels rounded and flat so any of the hundred ideas it's running with don't conflict with the rest.

Series purists will decry this as a black sheep of sorts and claim to resent it, even though they've never played it. Lest we forget, New Vegas is an untouchable masterpiece, even if it's as emotionally dry and ineffectual, save for Obsidian's sterling ability to make you laugh. "Have you played New Vegas?"

Having spent an ungodly amount of time in New Vegas, what I will say about F4 isn't that it's the former's RPG mechanics that the latter loses. New Vegas had restraint. Thirteen years ago, when it was praised for its scale, it might not have seemed so. But in hindsight, Obsidian never let its ambitions outweigh its talent. Almost every piece of New Vegas feels deliberate in its inclusion because Obsidian gave themselves the space they needed to maintain that sense of intention. In Fallout 4, the overworld is so large that it almost makes sense that the solution to a locked door is almost always lockpicking/hacking or finding the key in a nearby desk with no in-between.

However, in spite of it all... I kinda loved my time with Fallout 4? Until the end, at least. I'm going to go off of a branch and say that this is the most fun I've ever had with a Bethesda game. Skyrim and Starfield are too sterile to resonate with me, and as much as I love New Vegas, even with a chunky modlist, it still feels like one of those mods the Bethesda community has been fixated on for nearly ten years that builds a new game on top of another existing one through mod tools. Despite it sharing the same janky, archaic properties that even the aforementioned modlists can't scrub from New Vegas, almost all of Fallout 4's systems feel refined in some way. Weapon modding is no longer a menu interaction that adds invisible buffs and debuffs; it's an involved process that lets you see the changes for yourself. Although I never got into it, settlement building could easily be ripped out of this to become its own game. Progression is a bit barebones, but what's there still allows for modular playstyles that alter the game. Like I always try to do with these games, I mained a stealth build that eventually got so overpowered that I was one-shotting super mutants with a silenced automatic pistol by the time endgame rolled around. Tying this all together is that, for the first time in this series' three-dimensional existence, Fallout 4 has really fun combat. It still borders on janky in a few areas but in general, shooting and whacking stuff felt appropriately flashy in appearance and sound, and I was delighted!

I cannot deny that I had a ton of fun with this game, but by the time I reached one of its four-ish endings, it had worn out its welcome. I would argue that that is the single flaw that holds all of Bethesda's modern output down. Until they can find ways to better pace their experiences, and allow them to be more meaningful than dumb fun, their contemporaries will keep outshining them.

...

(THE ANECDOTE BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS):

I did have two really funny stories from my time playing this that I'd like to share.

So, when you reach the institute and talk to Father, the game doesn't stop you from capping him in the head. And if you do it sneakily, the game doesn't stop you from capping almost everyone you see! So, for shits and giggles, I went around and did that until it caught up to me. I noticed there was an absolute shit-ton of enemies, but I didn't see them, so I figured I would be able to walk out of the institute with my pride intact. Wrong. As it turns out, the enemies I was seeing on my compass and listening to were below me, and because Fallout 4 is terrible with directional audio, I didn't know this until I took the elevator down. What I eventually discovered was an optimal strategy for dealing with the 60+ synths (not exaggeration!) trapped beneath me was to take the elevator down, fire off a mini-nuke, go upstairs, and wait for my status to reset from "Caution" to "Hidden", go downstairs, do that again until I was out of mini-nukes, start using my rockets, and then finish them off with a machine gun and some psycho. The pile of dead bodies not even halfway through this process was so absurd in its size that it momentarily tanked my game's framerate. Quite clearly, these developers either never considered this a possibility, or they didn't put up enough guardrails to prevent you from doing so, as I was not considered an enemy of the institute after my massacre. I guess if no one's alive to see you reach the exit, they can't put you on a hitlist.

But this pales in comparison to the stupidest moment in my entire playthrough. So, picture this: I'm on my way to confront the mayor of diamond city. He's a synth, he has a hostage, and it's up to me to settle his fate once and for all. My instinct, as a gun-for-hire that everybody is too pretentious and morally righteous to call a mercenary, is to lockpick the door and shoot him in the head. I notice my silenced pistol doesn't do stealth damage, so it takes two shots to the head to take him out. Not optimal. I reload my save and pull out my .50 caliber sniper rifle to do the job in one fell swoop. Before I can pat myself on the back, his hostage then gets up and starts shooting at everyone in the room, even though the bullet never hit her. If I shot her at all, everyone in the room would start shooting at me, but if I left her alone, they would finish her off. Reloading my save at least ten times because I couldn't believe my eyes, this was consistent. I may not give Fallout 4 as many marks as my playtime would suggest, but for giving me one of the funniest bugs/oversights I've ever seen in a game like this, it at least deserves some credit.

Ive spent close to 6000 hours of my life on the 10 year Destiny project, with a hope (or maybe an increasingly morbid curiosity, I cant figure out which one it is) of where it could go. What profound thing would the Traveler have to say? What exotic societies and concepts reside in the bounds of the greater cosmos outside our little solar system? When it was all said and done, what exactly was the Final Shape going to be and what shape would we have to take to deny it? In the story of the three great nations and the three great queens, would it mean we would have to be the third queen?

And so I am beyond disgusted that the answer to where itll go is: nowhere. Nothing mattered. It was all just opium, just vapor and sawdust and pretty colors and shiny things, whatever it would take to mesmerize you for another year and for another $100. It fills me with rage, to have seen such fertile soil curdled into pigshit and tar. Art so negligent it should be criminal, work so poisonous it should be illegal. I am beyond hate for Destiny, and if theres any justice in the world itll become insolvent for Bungie and laid to rest, where its swollen husk can be pillaged by creatives who are actually worthy of its potential.

I say this only as a half joke, I think Destiny fans should be in prison. You let Bungie get away with it, you permit them at every opportunity with success for being unimaginative.