Recent reviews by Allen

An unforgettable experience... I'm looking forward to Ragnarok next.

*Ragnarok is going the same way, improving on the already excellent gameplay formula.

It's back.

Death Stranding will surprise you with a very deep and cinematic experience that shows you exactly what type of world and game you're gonna get into.
The beginning hours may feel too overwhelming for the average gamer, throwing at you too many concepts about life, death, sci-fi, supernatural and survival elements right away in a seemly post-apocalyptic America.

Probably the strongest feature in the game is the story. It is slow and part of it being told through flashbacks, but once you start to link all the pieces you'll discover a great, well-crafted story that is worth the wait.
It will always keep you wondering what's gonna happen next, as you learn more about the world of Death Stranding, its characters, past incidents and other pieces of information only discovered via interviews and emails.
Narrative-wise, the story is divided by episodes, providing long cutscenes specially at the end of each episode, building more tension and unfolding a journey until it reaches its climax ending that's not easy to forget any time soon.
The only downside to this is the vast open world and gameplay that break the immersion and distract you from the main plot.

By far the weakest aspect of Death Stranding is the gameplay. The story itself can be really interesting and unique, but it all boils down to walking/driving long distances to make deliveries, it's really all the game has to offer and while it can get addicting as you'll always try to take on the next order, there's no denying how poorly designed the gameplay actually is, almost abusive even as you constantly stumble, tip and fall over basically easy to walk grounds.
When it comes to the game physics and collisions, it's probably one of the worst in recent years for a game of this caliber, with the main character, objects and vehicles moving in a very strange fashion and having almost over exaggerated animations.
There's absolutely no quality content except for the main orders and maybe a few standard orders, the progression system is always the same, consisting on gaining trust for different facilities and preppers by making deliveries to get new equipment or leveling up certain equipment or weapons.
Engaging in combat is totally optional, there's no reward by doing so unless it's related to certain retrieving item orders from hostile territories, although it's acceptable, it's not a game about killing, bur rather connecting and striving as one.

The game looks beautiful, with absolute stunning areas and a decent photo mode. The Decima Engine stands as one of the most advanced game engines graphically-wise speaking. The water simulation, character models, grassland and draw distances are actually pretty nice.

The music and sound design is really on point. From vehicle sounds to basic actions such as footsteps, ghostly voices, combat music, you name it, it all sounds great.
The game features a very sad, ambient, romantic and even nostalgic feeling OST by Low Roar, Silent Poets, Chvrches, Alan Walker, Khalid, Bring Me The Horizon, and many other artists which did great with tracks that offered value to the story.
Once again composer Ludvig Forssell did an amazing job with the music score.

This game suffers form Access Violations on multiple threads, also having memory and GPU leaks. Access Violations errors (which causes the game to crash and losing your progress) may have been caused by running scripts from the Decima Engine itself and as of version v1.02 they have not been fixed.

Story: ★★★
Gameplay: ✰✰✰
Visuals: ★★★
Memorable: ✮
7/10

I don't understand why is everyone saying this game is not for everybody. In fact it's a game everyone should experience at least once, if only because of its story, world, lore and visuals. Not everything has to be a shooter, action or RPG to be a great game that everyone must play or just a great piece of art in general.
With Death Stranding, however, if you can put up with its ridiculously repetitive gameplay and funky physics, you can find a really memorable journey, one that will not be forgotten for a long while.

Pushing the gaming industry boundries, creating something artistically unique and translating your vision into the videogame medium for other players to interact with is always appreciated and should always be welcomed.

The coolest part of this game is that you don't either have to play football nor racing games to actually enjoy it or get into it.
The gameplay is addicting and satisfying as you get better at it, the graphics are decent and the soundtrack is amazing!

Edit: It's not fun anymore.

I'm only leaving a positive review "just cause" I'd love to see a better, more improved Just Cause 5.

Just Cause is known for its mindless explosive adrenaline action, but here all we've got are stupid challenges everywhere, this game is 20% story and 80% challenges, take this vehicle and go through this ring, or go through another ring at xyz speed... basically the whole game.

I don't understand what went wrong with the classic liberating states and taking over outposts by blowing everything, that formula was at least entertaining, it was fun! not all these mindless challenges that are but a waste of time, oh and on top of that, some of these challenges are truly annoying.

This game feels like a cheap and lazy extension to Just Cause 3, if you remove all the useless challenges, it'd take but a few hours, there's no sense of progression at all, because advancing your troops does absolutely nothing, the least it should have done is to reveal all locations in the area but not even that! you have to discover every single location by yourself! in a map that is huge, like, what on earth?

I'm truly disappointed with this entry, it's not a bad game by any means, and it looks stunning, but gameplay wise it's a downgrade from previous Just Cause games, fans of the series loved to defeat the enemy by taking over their territory, exploding military bases, outposts to weaken them and then rebuild everything, that gave us a sense of progression, that gave us satisfaction... satisfaction that was taken away by the developers by replacing all this action sequences with challenges, that don't even make sense, JC3 challenges were incredible, they were fun at least.
But wait, there's more, sometimes the controls feel unresponsive, like, when under pressure, the grappling hook won't work properly, same thing with the hover board...

It took me +150 hrs to finish JC2 100% with all achievements (kept playing it because it was great)
It took me 100 hrs to finish JC3 100% with all achievements. (kept playing it because it was quite better)
It took me 61 hrs to finish JC4 100% with all its 61 achievements (uninstalled as soon as I reached this point)

We can all agree that Dynasty Warriors 9 was a mess at launch, having multiple bugs, optimisation issues and missing core features, this game wasn't ready to be released and as a result it didn't reach its full potential. Many fans were disappointed with the introduction of a new Open World system, being way too large and distracting from the action, which is the reason why Musou games are known for.

However, does DW9 deserve all the hate it got at launch? Absolutely not, not now at the time I write this review. It has been improved, optimised, and new features have been added with updates and patches, including the Local/Online Co-op which makes the game quite more enjoyable. I praise the developers for continuing to support this game, improving it and making it great as it should have been at launch, thank you.

I personally like the Open World introduced in this entry, it looks nice and fresh, but like every Open World game, it becomes a little bit boring and repetitive eventually, still I praise the AI and changes in events that occur in the world in real time depending on your action and quests you take on. Overall it's a game I'd come back to and play it all over again, I love Musou games and as a Dynasty Warriors fan, DW9 is no exception, it's actually exceptional for trying new features and stand out from previous DW games. The only drawback I can find is multiple Season Passes, once again, this is an awful gaming market strategy and anti consumerist.

One of my favourite franchises of all time, it's back and remastered this time around. It's a real pleasure for a fan of this series to be able to play this game again and keep it in my library forever, since the PS2 era is already long gone.
This isn't one of those long games, but it's satisfying enough if you're going for 100% game completion, I did it back in the day and will do it again, the game is just fantastic. I'm yet another fan who's waiting for the rest of the Onimusha games to be remastered for current-gen platforms, including Steam.

Onimusha: Warlords is the 1st entry of this classic franchise, it's an action adventure game set during the Edo Period in Japan, adding dark fantasy elements such as the existence of ancient demons, Nobunaga Oda makes a pact with them leading to his resurrection as a demon lord and raises an army of demon warriors to conquer Japan, providing many sacrifices for them in the progress. On the other hand, you play Samanosuke Akechi, a samurai warrior who, alongside his partner Kaede, suddenly find themselves on a quest to save princess Yuki, which is Samanosuke's cousin, upon realising that there's a clan that has been fighting against those demons, Samanosuke is given the power to finally be able to stand against them, unfolding a series of events that make up for a very interesting story.

This is really my favourite Final Fantasy game, besides FFXII The Zodiac Age. Unlike many other adventure games, this one is really charming, the world is beautiful to explore, it feels fresh and alive, the interactions between characters are also nice and graceful, it truly feels like you're not alone in this adventure.
The fighting mechanic is absolutely brilliant, it's fast paced and sort of a hack 'n' slash, which I really enjoy and prefer among all the games in the FF series.
The story, while not as complex as in the other titles, it's fairly simple to follow and that's just fine by me. The game was still open to new DLCs and expansions to fill it even more but they were cancelled, unfortunately.

It's really sad to see the departure of FFXV's director, just like that, without being able to continue developing and updating such an ambitious game Final Fantasy XV actually is.

Dear BANDAI NAMCO, I don't know if you are aware of this, but gamers hate SEASSON PASSES. Making people pay for characters that should be in the game in the first place is nothing but a disrespectful move against TEKKEN fans, but hey, I'm just saying.

Overall, it's a great game, with a solid gameplay and well optimised.

It's finally here! This is a dream come true for many Yakuza fans on Steam.
Great port, no issues so far and I'm looking forward to more Yakuza games and other titles such as Virtua Fighter 5.
Thank you SEGA!